Pegasus Books at 40

Published 3:30 am Thursday, May 28, 2020

If there’s anyone in Bend who knows superheroes, it’s Duncan McGeary, the longtime owner of Pegasus Books, a comic book shop in downtown Bend. He believes there are real-life superheroes afoot in Central Oregon. You may even be one yourself. “When I started thinking about it, what sort of came to me was this (pandemic) has shown how important a regular average citizen is, an average person is,” McGeary said. “What can big-time actors or sports heroes do right now, except sit at home like the rest of us? It turns out, by God, we need the guy at the grocery store, the person at McDonald’s. Our society is so interconnected that we need everybody.”

He then noted that in modern comics, the characters’ humanity, their flaws and foibles, as much as their powers are what really make them absorbing.

“Superman would be a very boring person if it’s just all about how he’s all-powerful, but he has human problems. It’s the humanness that carries stories nowadays,” McGeary said. “In the movies, where Iron Man is mentoring Spider-Man, that connection makes them both more interesting.”

Except for perhaps Marvel’s Wolverine and other heroes with healing factors, most superheroes would be susceptible to COVID-19, argues McGeary.

“Right? So that would bring them down to our level pretty fast,” he said. “That’s an interesting concept.”

It may be hard to believe, but brace for impact: Pegasus Books, which in addition to comics and graphic novels also sells toys, games and prose books, is now 40 years old. Founding owner Mike Richardson, who would go on to launch Dark Horse Comics in Portland, initially opened the shop on Greenwood Avenue in 1980, a couple of years before moving Pegasus to its longtime Minnesota Avenue home. April marked 36 years of ownership for McGeary.

“What people don’t remember about downtown Bend in 1982 or ’83, whenever (Richardson) did that, it was half-empty,” said McGeary, who bought the shop from Richardson in 1984.

“The two malls had just opened a few years before that, and downtown emptied out,” McGeary continued. “The irony is one of the reasons that Pegasus Books is in downtown Bend is because it was originally cheap rent, and we could afford it.”

Those days are long gone, like the malls and the neighbors, but Pegasus endures, supported through the years by a mix of regular customers — many of whom have personal boxes into which their weekly comics installments are placed — and tourists.

Since Pegasus reopened May 15 with limited hours of noon to 4 p.m. daily, business has been fairly steady, and McGeary is cautiously optimistic: As he wrote Tuesday on his longtime blog, The Best Minimum Wage Job a Middle Aged Guy Ever Had, “I haven’t been talking about the store because I haven’t wanted to jinx it. But things have been going extraordinarily well. Basically, our expenses are down and our sales are up, even though we’re only open four hours a day.”

As downtown Bend has upgraded through the years, so too has McGeary made improvements. Such work can be difficult to squeeze in with steady customers, McGeary said, but the two-month closure that came with Gov. Kate Brown’s Stay Home, Save Lives order enabled him and manager Sabrina Cooper to do much-needed remodeling, including replacing the shop’s dusty old carpet with new flooring.

Focus on writing

Cooper has worked for McGeary for about 10 years. Having her on board has enabled McGeary to focus on his writing, which extends well beyond his blog, to which he posted daily for a number of years.

McGeary has been prolific in writing books, too, despite the 25 years of self-described writer’s block he endured after the publication of three fantasy novels in the early 1980s. About 10 years ago, McGeary began writing toward publication again, mostly science fiction, thrillers and horror, and now estimates he’s penned close to 25 books — not all of them published, he’s quick to add.

With McGeary working two days a week and focusing on writing and the forthcoming publication of his next book in July, much of the keeping up with superhero titles now lands on Cooper.

“Superheroes are such an American creation, right next to apple pie and rock ‘n’ roll,” Cooper said, adding that the last several years have seen the advent of “characters that kind of speak to the American zeitgeist.”

For instance the Kamala Khan version of Ms. Marvel.

“She’s probably, like, the most popular superhero of this generation,” Cooper said. “She’s a Pakistani-American in New Jersey, so her stories are a little smaller-scale than the big Marvel New York City superheroes. She’s been an interesting example of a fictional character fighting real-world injustice.”

That series was initially targeted at younger readers, who have returned to comics in a big way. For a number of years, many an article was written about the graying comic book readership.

“The comic industry sort of ignored young readers, and especially young women, for a really long time,” Cooper said. “Superhero comics were late to the game in realizing that kids are readers, they’re a big important part of (the) audience.”

Cooper and McGeary have witnessed the return migration at Pegasus.

“We have been getting a lot more younger kids in looking for Spider-Man than we were getting 10 years ago. We love that,” McGeary said. “I think the acceptance and the general awareness that comic books have quality is much higher than it used to be.”

When Cooper started working there 10 years ago, the customers were on average 30 and up, she said.

“We definitely had some readers in their 20s, and I think there’s always a couple of high school age people that have that interest, but there’s been a cultural turn over that time,” Cooper said. “I’ve seen our audience skew younger and older, as people become more aware of what kind of reading material is out there in comics — superhero comics and other kinds of comics.”

Young adult graphic novels are very popular at Pegasus, said McGeary. About 10 to 15 years ago, he began diversifying his inventory to include board games and more mainstream books along with comics.

“When downtown Bend started becoming more popular, and the rents started going up, I had to look for things that I could sell to the public rather than just to the fanboys,” he said. “Books are what I went for, and games. … Those two elements I brought in, and those have become super important to the store.”

Asked about the shop’s future, McGeary said, “I’m hoping it will keep going. Maybe without me in charge, but I want it to keep going. I want to leave it — this sounds pretentious — but as a legacy, or something that I did that I can look back on and say, ‘Here it is.’

“It’s really interesting that it’s been around for so long. I never expected to make a career out of it,” he said, laughing. “It just sort of became that.”