Just curious, how dost anybody here get their sequential art fix these days? For me it's been a combination of buying physical copies online from online retailers, including the occasional title directly from some small publisher - buying e-comics and
ough: the occasional reading stuff online for free and not paying - though to be fair I mostly do that to satisfy my itch with older comics, especially from the 60s-80s that can be hard to find, and pricey as well because of every retailer who believes "old comic" = "should be a ridiculous price", prices as determined by what someone I saw referred to as the crazy great-aunt's pricing guide - like your older female relative who found some beat-up old Archie Comics digests or tattered 70s anthology comics while digging through an attic or such and thought they were worth a lot of money.
I haven't visited an actual direct market comic shop in a few years - not that I've soured on the very idea of brick and mortar comic retailers, it's just gotten too easy to get what I want online, and the nearest comic shop I would consider stepping foot in is too far away to justify the expense of driving there and back on a semi-regular basis.
My experiences with comic shops include the good and the not so good and the awful - though I've had a few Friendly Local Comic Shops over the years I used to consider regular stops. The first shop I ever went to as a regular, well it was a bit of a dump, but for the most part an alright place - I'd seen worse before and after, and better but it was what it was.
I'll refer to this establishment as "Green Star Comics", not it's actual name, but vaugely close enough. GSC had it's faults, the people there would order ridiculous amounts of the latest HOT comic and sometimes not a single copy of certain other titles, including mainstream DC and Marvel ones. Disorganization in the back issues, including some not even priced properly, and a bargain bin area that was barely in any sort of order, special orders that might come in months after they were made, if they did, etc. Though they had a decent selection of comics from publishers other than the Big Two, including smaller ones you may not have known about unless you were wired directly into the Direct Market since 1980. True, you'd have to sift through the back issues, especially in those spots where disorder had set in, but it was sort of worth it.
However, Green Star compensated for these faults by having friendly staff who actually engaged with their customers, would offer recommendations to people about books and other things that were coming out that they'd probably be interested in but might not have heard about, they weren't like some clerks at stores I've seen who were openly contemptuous of the folks buying their books
at best.
GSC was my place for about three and a half years before I had to move away, and then not too long later, about ten years ago, I learned that after a couple of changes of management and ownership they had shut down. They had even mostly vanished from the Web by then, my searches turning up mostly a couple of passing mentions on a few sites listing them as a place to buy collectible card games. A few years later, stirred by memories I idly did a search for the place and it had completely vanished from the internet by then. It's funny, to still have something of a faint attachment to that dump, or maybe not so funny at all.
