We are not universally loved and admired. I'm often taken aback by how much some comic fans dislike comic shops. Dislike? More like hate with a passion. The venom and anger exhibited is just really strange. I just came across this comment on the web:

"You know, you look at a direct sales comic shop and its like someone puked comics and comics merchandise from floor to ceiling, all over every inch. I know that profits are trying to be maxe'd out with money spent on store spaces, but it's kind of creepy some of these stores -- no wonder book stores are more attractive places to gain new trade paperback readers."

Ouch. I wince, because we resemble that remark.

I just try to weigh that kind of hostile sentiment against the many and constant compliments we get from customers, especially people from out of town. But this idea that comic shops should just dry up and go away, so that bookstores can take their place is just wrongheaded and obtuse. If the direct market goes away, so does comics, and also most independent graphic novels.

Brian Hibbs, of the Comix Experience in San Fran, does a yearly analysis of bookstore vs. comic store sales. (On Newsarama). It's terribly wonky and dense, but if you're willing the wade through it, has some very revealing stats.

The growth of sales of graphic novels in bookstores has been explosive. And it seems as though the publishers, and even our main supplier, Diamond Comics through their bookstore arm, are focused more at increasing the sales in bookstores than they are at helping the direct market.

Bookstores have a mechanism, through their Point of Sell computers, of keeping track of what books sell. Comic books stores, by contrast, buy their books non-returnable and don't report sales, so basically us comic store owners are the buyers, and doesn't keep track of reorders at all. (About half of my numbers are reorders, for instance, which don't show up at all. ) What seems lost in all the talk about growth in the bookstore market is that that growth is coming from zero, so it looks very impressive. Growth in the direct market is much more mature.

And yet, the growth in the direct market is matching the bookstore market step by step. We both are seeing about 12% growth per year. But that isn't automatically noticeable, unless you really examine the figures.

It reminds me of when I started with zero baseball card sales, and grew by an average of 33% a year for five years straight, until they represented 85% of my sales. What that obscured, however, is that comic sales were also growing by double digit numbers. As it turned out, much of the growth in cards was bubble, and most of the growth in comics was solid.

What's really strange is that all the indy comics elitists, who are angry at most comic shops for carrying mostly Marvel and DC, are cheering for our demise because they think that bookstores will treat them better.

Yet all you have to do is examine the figures and you discover that unless you are one of the top independent titles, most bookstores won't carry you at ALL! So, while it may seem pathetic that only 300 out of 3000 comic shops carry diverse material, those 300 shops are the only thing keeping art comics alive. The real effort should be in increasing the number of comic shops that will carry offbeat material.

Hating comic shops seems really counterproductive to me. It's like a starving man turning down a meal because he doesn't like the seasonings.