Wanderland

I've just returned from Wonderland of the Americas. Were it ever worthy of its grandiose name, the mall has since lost any capacity to instill wonder in its shoppers. Wonderland is a mall that doesn't know it's dead. Malls of this kind are sometimes called ghost malls, but the zombie seems a better metaphor. About half of the Wonderland's storefronts are empty; the other half, outside of a couple national chains, are occupied by nondescript stores that only seem to be in business but may in fact be figments of an overworked imagination.

Today you could roller-skate the Wonderland without fear of endangering a soul (apart from yourself, escalators and gravity being what they are), but its broad corridors were once packed with shoppers, arms akimbo with jumbo-sized bags, trudging from one outpost to another. They're gone now, mostly, apart from the families who gather to sit on leather couches in one of the mall's several living room-style arrangements, or the couples who shuffle along, near-dazed, pausing now and then in front of vacant storefronts to peer through dusty windows and imagine, or perhaps remember, what commerce once took place there.

Perhaps they feel the same inexpressible pleasure that I feel while wandering zombie malls, the bittersweet of nostalgia, sharpened by wistfulness and seasoned with just a hint of schadenfreude. A sense of expectancy also, as if the mall could awake at any time.

The upside of being down at the heels, at least in Wonderland's case, is that rents have tumbled enough that small businesses now make up most of the mall's shops. Perhaps because the mall also doubles as a convention space, one that hosts geeky gatherings like Monster Con and Morphinominal Expo, many of these shops cater to various fandoms, making Wonderland of the Americas an unexpected hub of San Antonio's geek culture, a pedestrian-friendly space dense with desirable destinations unlike most of the city. There's the store that sells Funkos, and only Funkos. There's the shop that sells wrestling memorabilia, and the one where you can buy a dress patterned with art from EC Comics. And there's Gotham Newsstand, a comic shop managed by a Trinity University alumnus.

Located in the mall's Little Shops, a onetime department store now carved up into, well, little shops by means of gridwalls, Gotham Newsstand has expanded from its humble origins. Its floor plan, perhaps 400 square feet on opening, has doubled, and the staff have crammed every inch with comics. Note that I didn't write comics and memorabilia. Newsstand has its share of knick-knacks, like most stores of its kind, but the store is notable in that it specializes in comics, including many from publishers I had never heard of. I can think of no better piece of praise than that, except to note the wonderful display the store has made in honor of Pride Month, which is crowded with comics—like Gotham Newsstand itself, an encouraging sign of how far comics have come since I first fell for them in 2001.

Is this typical of the opportunity that zombie malls can provide local entrepreneurs? I don't know, but it makes me want to take up Haitian voodoo, or at least the kind practiced in the movies.

#deadmalls