Tom Spurgeon has an eloquent editorial up on his site in favor of saving America’s comics shops and, in general, toning down the pro-bookstore, anti-shop rhetoric:
Let me put the idea out there that the state of the comic shop is worth talking over, and worth being critical about, not because they suck but because the comic shop is currently and can remain a beneficial component to the sustained growth of the industry and art form. Comic shops can enable readers and support devotees. Their basic business arrangement’s consequence in allowing low-capital entry into the market via non-returnability has been a boon to the serviced art form equaled by no other medium in the last 30 years, and that can continue. They can carry a much wider and more extensive array of work across genres and artist by artist than more generalist brick-and-mortar structures, and can facilitate a much more effective pool of commercial expertise accessed by readers face to face and over a long period of time than nearly any other place that sells such work.
He then goes on to suggest a number of ways in which stores (and the direct market) might improve. Makes for good Tuesday reading.
