2025
My annual year in review! Where I discuss the trials and tribulations of being a tiny indie comic shop in the Dublin city centre. See past years roundups here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021
[Deer in the header by Helene Pertl, creator of the deer in the Little Deer logo!]
Up and Down (and Up again)
Sales this year were a roller coaster, they started surprisingly strong, the usual winter slump didn't come, maybe these things even out over time as the shop gets more established? It was a real surprise when January to April were better than the year before. It made freezing in the uninsulated shop not so bad.
But despite a strong winter into spring, storm clouds were on the horizon. A Republican president in America means a global economic crisis is at hand (red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning). The strong winter and spring gave way to total uncertainty and chaos (as it was designed and expected to do) when distributors and booksellers and publishers all tried to figure out what tariffs meant for them, and consumers looked at what was happening and accurately deduced that it was Bad News Bears and stopped spending.
From May-October sales nose dived. Less than the year before, some months dramatically so. And the gap between 2024 sales and 2025 sales widened every month, so as the crisis went on it was worsening as well.
Here's where my basic understanding of global and domestic economic expectations starts to break down. Cause we were on path for a bloodbath of a Christmas season. The way the 2024 and 2025 sales lines were diverging, we were looking at sells so far below 2024 that they might have reached 2023 levels. But for factors unbeknownst to me we had our best Christmas season yet?
Was it the election of Zohran and Catherine? Optimism for the future?
Maybe the increasing senility and sunsetting of the Horse-in-a-Hospital across the pond showed people a light at the end of the tunnel?
Did the extension of the Basic Income for the Arts scheme in Ireland give artists hope that they might not be destitute in 2026?
Ireland's annual budget was generally nothing to write home about (especially compared to last year's giveaway budget). If anything the continued atrophying of transport spending (no new Luas until 2030 despite shovel ready plans for more lines since the last extension opened in 2017??) led to a shockingly congested Dublin, to the point where in December I had to pay for last minute shop cover because family couldn't reach us through the traffic jams to help mind the kids.
Did Little Deer finally remain open in the same location long enough in one spot that people knew where to find us when it was time to buy Christmas presents? Is there some magic being open for over 4 years? Is this what being established is like?
It was the first holiday season where I started to understand what small businesses meant by holiday season sales. In past years, Little Deer's November and December months barely registered as a blip.
One notable factor compared to recent years was that this was the first Christmas season to not feature a total catastrophe in Dublin. We had a red storm warning in 2024 that wiped out an entire DCAF day and a week of sales around it. In 2023 there was the Dublin race riots that killed shopping in the city centre for three weeks. 2025, despite an abnormally wet November, didn't have any dramatic surprises. Maybe that's all Little Deer needed.
Aggressively Hostile
While Little Deer's sales were an Up Down Up rollercoaster, DCAF experienced it's own rollercoaster, Down Up Down in this case!
At the end of 2024 DCAF hadn't received confirmation of our 2025 dates from our venue the Richmond Barracks. We didn't know why they wouldn't let us book dates but we were worried.
When 2025 began we found out we were right to be worried!
The Barracks was undergoing extensive renovations in 2025, the library would remain open, moving into the venue side of the building, while the rest of the building had works done. There would be no more indoor events at Richmond. They would still host a few outdoor events but Dublin had lost another event venue.
Panic stations! Myself and the rest of the DCAF Committee priced other venues, tried to track down mysterious venues with obfuscated ownership and management, everything was more expensive, but almost none provided the same or better than Richmond Barracks had.
Until we contacted The Complex. Yes more expensive than the barracks but larger, so large in fact that we could return to being a single day event! We hadn't been a single day event since The Chocolate Factory in 2019.
2-day events are exhausting.
1-day events are also exhausting, but at least when it's over it's over!
Our first event at The Complex in April was a smash hit for turnout. They had to hold people back because we reached capacity multiple times in the day! That's never happened before! It was our highest turnout by almost double!
We're not entirely sure what factors led to that turnout because the rest of the year was more in line with regular DCAF turnouts, but good anyway!
Despite Richmond Barracks not being far out of town (just a few Luas stops between the two venues) the recurring refrain from our audience was that they were excited we were "back in the city again."
4 events deep at The Complex we were starting to recognize challenges with the new venue that we are (were?) hoping to tackle in 2026. Our workshops and talks got sidelined slightly, partly due to our capacity to organize them and partly because the shape and layout of The Complex creates a different space than previous venues with no obvious place to host talks and such. Well, there is one obvious place, The Gallery, another room within The Complex. But we can't really afford the additional space rental without raising table prices (again).
So we used the loft space for workshops and talks, but we've had trouble herding people up the stairs. Maybe we're not promoting that side of DCAF enough, or maybe we're not creating an enticing enough programme. But we're struggling to get people to do things with us upstairs.
All of this problem solving might be moot point, since we may lose The Complex in 2026!
I've often said in interviews that Dublin is aggressively hostile to the arts and entrepreneurs and this is sadly another example of that.
If The Complex closes DCAF will have a real scramble in 2026.
It will be the 6th time since 2017 that DCAF has lost a venue due to the venue closing.
There are not many places left for DCAF to jump to.
Most are smaller, more expensive, less central. None of us are super enthused about the possibility of going back to being a 2-day event.
We're really hoping the local/national governments do the right thing and #savethecomplex I wish I understood why politicians in Ireland don't want the easy win, it landed in their laps, they can point to their entire careers, "I did that."
It's disgusting that it hasn't been saved yet. If the government doesn't take such an easy gimmie of a victory for the arts, then what other message could we possibly take from that other than that Ireland in general and Dublin specifically is aggressively hostile towards artists?
To have this all come out right before Christmas added a Dickensian air to the whole affair. And just when DCAF was organised enough to get Kat to design a lovely 2026 dates poster! We were going to send it to publishers and try to get more international attention for DCAF! That would be so much more fun than desperately searching for a new venue.
Funding (or lack there of)
In 2025, DCAF attempted (again) to gets Arts Council funding. We failed (again).
It's difficult to not be dispirited. I need to meditate more.
DCAF Committee members spent 3 months working on our funding application. And the Arts Council looked at an established arts event (started 2017! survived the lockdowns! 27 events!! one of the only masked events on the island! 100+ local artists at every event! multiple colleges build their curriculum around their students exhibiting zines at DCAF! successfully printed an anthology with Arts Council funds previously!) and decided we weren't worth a cent.
At the same time the Arts Council has tabled at every DCAF event for two years to do artist outreach and encourage more comic creators to apply for Arts Council funding. Even knowing the folks doing outreach aren't the same ones judging our application, it's still hard to not take the obvious contradiction personally.
One ray of hope was that I heard a local comic artist got a Writer's Bursary to create a comic in 2026!
I was hoping for dozens of comic artists to win bursaries, but one is a start anyway.
Maybe I can be paid to make comics as well as sell them someday.
Published!
More Irish creators had debut publications this year, Aaron Losty's The Hanging! Kat Foyle's Double Take! Tricky to import the books from America but still exciting!
Prizes & Collabs
Little Deer continues to take cautious baby steps towards publishing someday but it's been hard to watch what happens to places like Silver Sprocket, spinning plates of retail and publishing at the same time. That pit of your stomach feeling when a plate warbles.
The DCAF Printing Prize was a success in 2024. And I'm grateful that Way Bad Press agreed to do it again this year. Six little zines now have had lovely mini RISO print runs, the artists get free books to sell, Way Bad gets paid. And since we print a few extra for Little Deer it's not a total loss for me. Maybe in 2026 I print enough extra so that my losses are even less.
Inspired by the printing prize, I wondered about other print-collaborations. What if this is an avenue forward? An artist prints their comic with Way Bad Press, I cover the print costs, wholesale purchase the printed comics from the artist, Little Deer gets another comic on the shelf!
Do I make money?
Not really.
But I don't think I'd make money publishing either, and publishing comes with a lot more work and responsibility (advances! editing! international distribution! storage! press! tours! residuals! ACK) This is essentially just buying a comic to stock in the shop, but instead of asking the artist to absorb printing costs and ship their books to Ireland at great expense, Conor and Izzy at Way Bad Press run off a batch on their RISO and drop the comics at my door.
Doesn't that sound nice?
At the start of 2025, I thought maybe I could do 4 print-collabs with 4 different artists (maybe one for each DCAF?).
By the end of 2025, I had completed... 1 print-collab.
It turns out even not-publishing is tricky!
I've followed Mollie Cronin's comics for years. Not knowing anything about Mollie beyond her Instagram comics, I asked if she had anything she might want to RISO print at Way Bad Press in Dublin. It turns out her Art Brat Comics are just online! Never printed!
A debut! La-dee-dah!
It got better!
In 2025 Conundrum Press was going to publish a new book from Mollie: Future Me is Fat!
AND I didn't even know that at the same time I was emailing Mollie, Conundrum Press was emailing with another DCAF committee member about coming to a DCAF in 2025!
AND coincidentally, not in coordination with me or Conundrum Press at all, Mollie just happened to be planning a holiday in Ireland!
Serendipity! Stars aligned! Print-collab is go!
Mollie dug into her ten year archives of Art Brat Comics, deciding what she'd like printed in a little RISO collection, scanned them and emailed the files to me. Myself and Kat did our best to not make a mess of the files (I may have made a small mess of them) and then Izzy and Conor pulled a rabbit out of a hat with their RISO work just under the hard deadline of the October DCAF event!
WOW
What did I learn from all this?
The main thing I learned from all this was to never have a hard deadline ever again, hahaha. It would have been one thing to just print a comic with Mollie, but since she had plane tickets to Ireland and was our special guest at DCAF, now every time I made a mistake or didn't respond to an email promptly enough or got distracted by the day-to-day of the shop, there was the very real possibility that the comic wouldn't get printed in time!
But in the end Izzy and Conor played a blinder, fixed all the mistakes I made and we got them hot off the presses just in time to meet Mollie at DCAF on Sunday.
Mollie was happy with the result I think! I hope anyway!
The slight flaw in my print-collab plan is if the artist is far away (Canada in this case), then they don't get the pleasure of seeing their comics in their local shops as the comics are here in Ireland.
Mollie took a few home with her. Hopefully they can be used as a proof of concept for a publisher to pick up her Art Brat Comics. It's just a print collaboration so I've no exclusive rights to the book. Anyone could make a deal with Mollie for Art Brat Comics and I highly encourage other shops and publishers to go for it!
Maybe I never really want to be a publisher, maybe this Print-Collab-Scheme is all I want to do?
Since printing the book with Mollie I've daydreamed often of a network of comic shops and RISO studios that take up out-of-print comics and print it to sell in-store. Artists get paid, RISO studios get gigs, shops get lovely unique stock, it's win win win.
Maybe this kind of RISO-shop-zine-network is more exciting than attempting to become a publisher. Something that looks like it costs a lot of money but also somehow no one makes money?
I might talk to a few other comic shops and RISO studios in 2026 to see if they want to link up.
One payday from Little Deer isn't much, but if there was a network of likeminded shops all doing the same thing around the world, each willing to pay an artist to print an out-of-print mini comic? Maybe it would add up to something worthwhile.
Filming and Interviews
Two students asked to film vignettes in Little Deer this autumn for their classes. One was a little promo for the shop, and the other was an interview and some B-roll. Another student interviewed me for print.
I generally don't like giving interviews and appearing on audio / video (there's a reason I surrounded myself with books) but the shop can always use the promotion and I think it's good to say yes to students.
Brings me back to my film school days to see people filming in the shop. Almost made me want to make little shop vignettes myself (time, money, alas)
A vignette by Candis (Sage) Tagiso:
An interview by Sam Burnham:
STORAGE
A funny collection I purchased this year was a silly amount of old 2000AD magazines.
It was too many.
I didn't lose money on the purchase, I've sold enough to break even. But the shop just isn't big enough for me to be buying almost a thousand comics. I think I still have over 500 left.
That's just silly.
When Big Bang Comics in Dundrum moved locations this year, they also offered Little Deer some boxes of their old sales section that they didn't want to relocate. A carload of books.
Again, the shop is FAR too small for me to be saying yes to this many books. But I said yes anyway.
I'm sure people have noticed the increase of the general level of clutter in the shop, but it's hard to not say yes to things! I also said yes to tons of French-language comics this year. We don't sell many French-language comics. And boxes of DVDs! We don't sell many used DVDs.
I also purchased all the remaining stock from Conundrum Press' DCAF visit. 100 books isn't much for a publisher, but for a shop that generally only orders 30-50 books a week it's quite a bit!
It's worth it though to say with confidence that we're the largest stockiest of Conundrum Press books in all of Europe! Including a few books not stocked anywhere else!
Grateful that my larger purchases recently were with very patient sellers who were very accepting of my installment payments. Can't afford anything all at once.
Have I learned my lesson in all this? I have not! I eagerly anticipate any and all offers of everything. The shop is more stocked than it's ever been but maybe this next box of used comics will be what helps me pay off debt and actually make a paycheck for myself.
TITE
A very cool opportunity came up this year when James with the Trans Image Trans Experience film festival invited Little Deer to table at The Lighthouse Cinema!
It's not our first Lighthouse tabling experience, but our first time with music and movies to offer!
It gave me a chance to expand my Queer Cinema stock and we even ended up getting some exclusive copies of Vera Drew's The People's Joker! I need to figure out how to restock it. It's so hard to get stock from America at a price customers can afford to pay.
We also helped some indie filmmakers sell their films, something I should try to do more of!
After importing Sally Cruikshank's DVD and carrying the North Circular documentary last year, I've thought about a print-collab-scheme for movies and music might be worth exploring as well!
Floods 5 (and 6)
It's funny that it's happened so often now that by the time I started writing this I'd forgotten the shop had two floods in 2025. The annual shop flood report in every year-end wrap up. What an absurd retail rental situation we're in.
Flood #5 was a bad one. Possibly the worst? An exposed lamp wire was in the water so we had to cut power to the shop before even going inside. Very eerie to look through the front window and see a dim bulb flickering from a lamp sitting in 5cm of water that you're 100% certain you turned off the night before.
Then the landlord's maintenance guy opened up the underground pipes in the back yard (where the flooding originates) and almost released raw sewage into the entire shop.
I actually walked away.
The landlord was there and the sewage was bubbling up from underground while the maintenance guy worked away and I just turned to him and said "call me when it's sorted" and walked out.
I couldn't watch.
It was grand in the end. The maintenance guy cleared the pipes before the sewage breached the threshold of the back door. Lost days of business and damaged our wooden furniture but only had to throw away a few second hand books.
In comparison, flood #6 was a cake walk. I was there when the downpour began, anticipated the flood, put down paper towels to catch the water as it rushed in the back door and used a broom to sweep away the leaves and debris that were clogging the backyard drain.
Only a single kettle full of water got inside the shop before I managed to stop the flooding.
Small mercies.
Bank Holiday Vintage Clothing
Vertigo Vintage has been setting up pop-ups in the shop on Bank Holiday Mondays this year and it's been really lovely.
I still can't afford to open Mondays (except in December) and I'm always happier if the shop can be useful.
Obviously it's a bit of a crapshoot for Maeve. Some Bank Holiday Mondays are busy, some are dead. But hopefully it's been worthwhile for her.
Stoneybatter Festival
Really need to invest in a proper gazebo and weights next year.
Bought the wrong kind of gazebo weights this year and got called out for it by the safety marshals. EEEK
Kat and Eimhin did lovely portraits and I love having Arash playing guitar. Really should have invited him to the DCAF Christmas Market, maybe that would have been a better use of the loft space.
I thought I'd do a sidewalk sale of the absurd amount of 2000AD books I had, but I only sold a few copies. Maybe a normal sidewalk sale or giveaway would have been more enticing? 2000AD might be too niche, even with crowds in the thousands.
More Publishers
Added 50Watts and Banzaï Editions to the lineup of publishers Little Deer stocks 2025! And managed to afford a restock of Bries and kuš!
Getting regular access to Peow again with the return of their European warehouse has been wonderful.
Still haven't gotten over the Hollow Press hurdle. I really need to just set aside a thousand in 2026 and make it happen. People keep asking for them.
I investigated signing up for Lunar distribution out of America to get my hands on more books, but don't think I can afford the weekly minimums yet. They also seem focused on floppies and my shop isn't set up for that world at all. Though it would be nice to get access to more minis from Silver Sprocket and Fantagraphics, etc.
I was better at Kickstarter in 2025 than I was in 2024. Still missed a few though. It all depends on the month. Sometimes an extra 150-200 outside my regular buying budget just isn't possible.
More Trees
Ivar got trees! Does that mean Manor Place is next? Goodness I hope so cause I can't wait to look out the shop's front window and see a lovely tree instead of a cube truck blotting out the sun.
I nearly hugged the landscape architects when they walked by out front measuring and photographing.
It sounds dramatic but getting a tree planted on Manor Place might be the most significant thing Little Deer does in its entire existence.
Newsletter
This was WAY more work than I'd anticipated and quickly dropped from weekly to fortnightly.
I thought it would help with the loss of audience and income from the destruction of Twitter.
But instead it felt like an additional repetition of my tasks that took hours. Repeating everything I'd done in social media and book logging for weeks but in email newsletter form. Often I'd prioritise book logging at the expense of the newsletter but then I'd have like 4-5 deliveries to talk about in the newsletter instead of 1-2. I need to figure out how to balance the workload to get it back to weekly.
Does it help sales?
I don't know.
But the audience grew slowly throughout the year (over 200 now) with almost no unsubscribes. So that's good?
And it is nice to have an avenue to slip in general "how are things going" news that don't always fit into social media posts.
Subscriptions
2025 was the first year I attempted a graphic novel (and all-ages) subscription service. Inspired by a few other shops I saw doing it. Several customers told me they'd prefer a monthly subscription fee instead of the lump sum payment options, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet, I don't want to use Patreon for it but I think there might be an option now within Shopify.
There's also that fact that the costs are supposed to even out over the year. So when I choose a €35 hardcover one month, I choose an €20 paperback the next. That doesn't really work if people can drop in and out month by month.
The amount of subscribers fluctuated throughout the year. I think the most at one point was 7 or 8? And the least, 3 maybe?
Subscriber purchases are huge boosts whenever they come in. Like a library or school purchases.
Here's the lineup of my picks for the year:
| Month | Graphic Novel | All-Ages |
| January | World Heist | Haru Book 1: Spring |
| February | Land of Mirrors | The Secret of Kells |
| March | Holy Lacrimony | Shred or Dead |
| April | Tongues | The Cartoonists Club |
| May | In Actuality + War on Gaza | Anzu and the Realm of Darkness |
| June | Ginseng Roots | The Lost Sunday |
| July | Spent | Moomin Adventures v2 |
| August | Sacred Bodies + Brigid + Monto | Deeply Dave |
| September | This Place Kills Me | Cry Out Loud |
| October | Buff Soul | Scarlet Morning |
| November | The Hanging + Art Brat Comics | Cabin Head and Tree Head |
| December | Garden of Spheres | Lu and Ren's Guide to Geozoology |
A successful first attempt I think! Two regulars resubscribed so hopefully that means people were enjoying the picks.
Looking back it serves as kind of a New Release reminder for the year. But I realize now almost all of both lists ran out of stock before Christmas. I didn't mean to end the year without a copy of Spent to offer anyone, but I can't afford to keep everything in stock all the time. Nor do I have the shelf space really.
A Shop Made of Cardboard
In a fit of winter madness, I started constructing cardboard boxes for DVDs, CDs, Cassettes and Vinyl. Covering them in coloured paper and labeling them with genres and subgenres.
I'd love to figure out how to do the same thing with nice wood instead of cardboard. And paint instead of coloured paper.
Consider this just a proof of concept.
2026 Matt can make it a reality somehow.
Got a lot more compliments this year about the movies and music sections. Thanks to the cardboard and coloured paper perhaps? And I think for the first time people were coming to Little Deer specifically for them, which is new! Even managed to fulfill a few requests even though it's trickier since I order comics every week but not-comics only once a month.
More Furniture (Less Events)
The shop added a few free shelves donated by kind customers, and one funny bookshelf I bought. All are overflowing now. The shop keeps growing.
But the most ridiculous purchase of the year was a gigantic drawing table that I absolutely should not have purchased.
It had a lovely industrial pedestal base. Highly adjustable. But the previous owner had removed the actual drawing table top and replaced it with a giant wooden kitchen counter.
I knew it might be too big when I showed up at the guy's house. But I still wanted it. Maybe I could put a smaller drawing board on it and do something else with the kitchen counter.
Maybe, with the small footprint of the pedestal, I could squeeze it in beside the desk and do some drawing again.
It was absolutely massive.
Took up a full fifth of the shop. I had to rearrange everything to get it in. It's lovely! Love the wood top, and everything looks good displayed on it, but in such a small shop its ridiculous.
No clue what I'll do with it. I'm not ready to give it up yet so I'll just allow it to be massive and inconvenient in the shop for a few more months and see how it goes. Maybe I get rid of the metal desk and it becomes the new desk?
It threw a spanner in my event planning though! Between the clutter of the new shelves, extra comics and the gargantuan table, there's now only room for 1 folding table and 6 chairs.
Hardly a gathering!
More puzzles for 2026 Matt to solve.
AI
There's not much new to say about AI. But what is new is the amount of businesses Little Deer depends on that have tied themselves to the mast of AI's sinking ship.
Mainly Shopify but other apps, sites and programs as well. Every "update" includes more AI "features," any and all of which are dangerous to my business, either because they hallucinate (Shopify generates spreadsheets that I rely on for tax purposes) or because if the inevitable AI bubble burst takes down Shopify with it... where does that leave Little Deer?
It's especially funny with Shopify because they moved their help/support/contact to all-bots a while ago, so I can't even voice my concerns to Shopify. I can't even say, "this sucks" to anyone anymore. There's no one there.
Mental (and Physical) Health
A wet November meant more migraines than usual for me (my migraines are barometer based). Good for Slice's business since migraine days are coffee days.
Even typing this little year end round up is flaring my carpal tunnel.
I still associate my worth and my happiness with Little Deer and DCAF's success. How people spend their money and how they spend their Sunday afternoon aren't in my control.
In 2025 I didn't solve the puzzle of how to steal more time for personal art. Here's hoping 2026 Matt has better luck.
I need to meditate more.
Stubbornness and Hope
So how is Little Deer starting 2026?
After all the bills were paid I ended the year with about half of January rent in hand and about €1000 left to pay in debt.
Obviously debt free with rent made and some pocket money for myself would have been nicer! But not bad since I made a lot of extra purchases this year and experienced a dreadful 5 month slump in the middle.
I should be able to make the last thousand of rent in the first week of January. And with luck I can pay the last 1000 in debt before I need to start raising February rent.
There are other things about the future of the shop that I'd love to talk about here but none of those plans are far enough along to discuss yet. For now 2026 will start the same way most years since 2021 have started, stubbornly remaining open despite not making any money, hoping that eventually something changes for the better.