Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we give our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems.)
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The original artwork for a 1979 comic strip of “Nancy,” featuring the fierce heroine and her iconic frazzled bob, hangs framed on the wall of Jeff Alford’s home basement in southeast Denver.
It faces Alford’s workstation where, when he’s not working remotely as an archivist for a Manhattan art gallery, he’s packaging orders made through his online comic book store, Wig Shop. A lifelong collector of small-press comics and zines, he started buying them in greater quantities and distributing them shortly after moving from New York in 2017.
Through Wig Shop, Alford, 42, has created a hub for fans of irreverent comics, abstract art, rare books and other printed curiosities. Many Colorado customers — myself included — have met him in person tabling at zine fests and book fairs up and down the Front Range.
No two items among the 1,300 he has sold — he’s assigned a catalog number to each one — are the same. They are made by artists around the country and abroad, who Alford finds through visual platforms such as Instagram and often use online print-on-demand services to publish their work, he said.
“Stylistically, I lean a little more towards silly, fancy, fantasy kind of stuff than horror or violent or sex stuff,” he said. “Sometimes it’ll dip between the two.”
The artists Alford reaches out to are usually receptive when he asks to sell their books in limited quantities, he said. But he has also published his own pressings under the Wig Shop name.
He recently collaborated with a Denver-area artist for the first time for his illustrated pressing of “The Gods of Pegāna,” a fantasy novella by Lord Dunsany first published in 1905.
“[H.P.] Lovecraft’s monsters all kind of came out of this story, and nobody really knows this book,” he said.
Alford typed the text off his own copy of the book and asked Aurora cartoonist Dustin Holland to paint around the margins. They gathered preorders through a Kickstarter campaign and spent two years on the final product.
“He made paintings for every chapter, marginalia, every chapter heading,” he said. “Every page of the book has some crazy illustration.”
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Another project compiles abstract watercolor paintings made by his friend, Los Angeles-based interior designer Jessica Jimenez Keenan. The prints of her work, published in a book called “Weavings,” feature geometric patterns and unblended edges and resemble lovingly worn quilts and floor rugs.
“I love this idea of pushing the comics fan toward more refined stuff, and pushing the refined fan more toward the lowbrow stuff,” Alford said of his desire to make the art book.
There is always one customer at each book fair or zine fest that chooses “Weavings” apart from all of his other books, he said. He printed 26 “lettered” versions that include an original watercolor by Jimenez Keenan, painted on thick, high-quality watercolor paper. Those are also on sale at his store.
“The Gods of Pegāna” and other books Wig Shop has published, such as comics made with Canadian cartoonist James Collier, are printed by the hundreds. Once production costs are recouped, Alford and the artist are able to split the profits, he said.
“I have always philosophically thought of the shop as an amplifier, like a megaphone, to these creators,” he said.
The expenses and time it takes to run Wig Shop have kept Alford from rushing out to open a physical bookstore, like others he has visited in New York or Chicago. With a family in tow and a day job, business is growing at a pace he can handle, he said.
Having a physical location would be the dream, though, since it would allow him to host touring cartoonists and other events.
For now, Wig Shop’s home of imaginative and quirky comic books is on the Internet at wigshopwebshop.com. Nancy would be proud.
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