The difficulties faced by specialty stores today in Sacramento

Comstock magazine wrote about today's specialty stores in and around the Sacramento region and the problems they face, which isn't just the 1949 law that prevented minors from buying, but was recently repealed:

Sacramento’s comic shop scene is a friendly one, but the city hasn’t always been a friend to comic book shops. Earlier this year, on Feb. 3, the Sacramento City Council repealed a 1949 ordinance that limited the selling and distribution of comic books to minors. The ordinance, Section 9.12.010, specifically referred to comics featuring crimes, which cut off most of that era’s most popular series, including Action Comics (home of Superman), Detective Comics (Batman), Wonder Woman and many others.

The ordinance hadn’t been actively enforced in decades and is now officially off the books, leaving Sacramento’s children and teens free to peruse the aisles of superhero comics at local stores like Empire’s Comics Vault, Comics & Collectibles and JLA Comics. But local shop owners and artists say that there are still plenty of challenges in the comic world.

One comic shop owner in Sacramento who is very familiar with these realities is Ben C. Schwartz, who opened his Arden Arcade store, Empire’s Comics Vault, in 2003. While he’s a lifelong comic fan and loves his work, he says that it’s not something to be taken on lightly.

“One of the things I think people don’t understand is that there’s a romanticized version of what it’s like to run a comic book store,” Schwartz says. “At the end of the day, it’s still a job, and it’s actually more than just a job because you own your own business.”

Schwartz says one of the biggest challenges to running the store was keeping people engaged, getting them in the store and getting them to come back. Arguably the most difficult aspect is managing his store’s inventory to meet customer demands.

“If people come in and they consistently can never find what they’re looking for, then they’re going to go somewhere else,” Schwartz says. “And if they go to the other shop and they find it, they might not come back here.”

One of the biggest changes shops worldwide have had to deal with came when major publishers like Marvel, DC and Image chose to stop working with Diamond Comic Distributors in 2020. JLA Comics owner Lecho Lopez, who opened his store in the Pocket-Greenhaven neighborhood in 2024, says that while it was more work to deal with multiple distributors, it was still an improvement compared to his experience with Diamond.

“They were the only game in town, so when we let them know, ‘The 1-in-50’s messed up, the 1-in-100’s messed up,’ they would say, ‘Here’s a refund for it,’ but we would still have a customer who requested them here,” Lopez says, referring to the variant copies that retailers can request for 1 or 2 percent of their order, usually featuring alternate covers done by different artists. “When I had the chance to work with someone other than Diamond, I took it because, yeah, they were a little more expensive, but all my books were getting here on time.”

Oh, I should've known, they'd even romanticize variant covers! Well that's not amusing today. All these years after variants made a joke of the industry, and you have only so many instances of buyers hoarding the stuff without reading it, if at all, and either slabbing them or putting them into a vault, this is not improving my perception of what the business is about. Perhaps most telling is that the retailers never say whether they wish the formats would change to paperbacks/hardcovers, and the reporters don't deliver such queries either. What good is coverage like this if they avoid challenging questions?

At least the above retailer did make the wise decision to turn to distributors other than Diamond, and as he hints, they had their problems with late deliveries. I just can't understand why anybody years before had to let them virtually monopolize the market, though what's also annoying is if some retailers got into the profession without a willingness to try other distributors, even if they were more costly. If there's independent bookstores who could do that, why can't comics specialty stores?

In terms of what comics are selling, all three owners noted that one of biggest changes in recent years has been what books are being bought and who is buying them.

Schwartz of Empire’s Comics Vault says that while the majority of readers he sees are in their 30s, he recently noticed an uptick in younger readers. He credits this to parents who read comics sharing them with their kids and notes that nearly 75 percent of these young readers are girls.

“The girls seem to be reading more,” he says. “Some of it is superhero stuff too, but a lot of it is just slice-of-life, which a lot of them gravitate to.”

And that's fine, so long as nobody asks that mainstream superhero comics literally adhere to the kind of PC mindset that's since brought them down over the past quarter century. On which note, the New Teen Titans appealed to plenty of girls/women back in the day, and now, all of a sudden, they're making it sound like nobody was used to adult perspectives and topics at the time such series were printed? And what exact superhero titles are the girls reading now anyway? If it's woke propaganda, that's the bad news.

Independent titles and those outside of the superhero genre have also seen an increased presence on store shelves. Farley of Comics & Collectibles says that while Marvel books still make up the biggest portion of her store’s book sales, independent titles are selling very well.

While it may be impressive independents are doing well, it's decidedly head-shaking if Marvel's are doing even better. What's anybody got to find in their modern output? Don't the local readers know how bad they became since the early 2000s? At the end:

The comics industry as a whole goes through its fair share of ups and downs, but for whatever difficulties they face, all three owners also flatly reject the idea that comic books or comic book shops are dead or dying.

“There’s always the doomsayers. ‘Print media is dead,’ I’ve heard it for the last decade,” Schwartz says. “But it’s not, because there’s nothing like holding a book in your hand. There’s so much more than just looking at the picture and reading the words.”

On this, relax, I highly value printed media. But if the story inside is horrifically bad, do they really think that won't have a long term impact? As expected, the retailers don't have the courage to address merit any more than the interviewers do. And what if more than just looking at pictures happens to be politics? If it's bad forms of politics, then do they expect all audiences, coast to coast, to buy and read it so easily? Again, no discussion comes up about political issues, and while it may have been brought up by a few retailers at the time Axel Alonso was EIC at Marvel, the mainstream press by and large doesn't address whether it was ill-advised. If retailers can't at least address challenging historical issues and whether it can affect comicdom even today, they certainly aren't improving the medium's image.