There is a Comic Book Out There for Everyone

So believes comic book store owners. Those owners are feeling pretty good, lately. They're doing pretty well, considering the internet and the rest.

From a piece in the Tacoma News-Tribune...

I speak of the old-fashioned comic-book shop, a vestige of Norman Rockwell America that has somehow managed to hang on and even flourish into the 21st century. Like most retail operations, comic-book shops have had their share of troubles over the past decade: According to a recent article in Business Week, there are now 3,000 shops operating in America, compared with the 10,000 that thrived in the 1990s.

But the ones that have lasted are proving more valuable now than ever. The owners of these places have managed to do something beautifully anachronistic in the iPad era: They're building actual physical communities, not virtual ones.