Another local comic shop bites the dust

[thunderbolt]

yeah, the days of browsing to discover something new/old are coming to an end. Now you will stare at a Amazon screen and buy what they have.

[ctc]

>the days of browsing to discover something new/old are coming to an end

Not really:

The Digital Comic Museum

I think too many folks are married to the past. Hell; when I think back to the good ol' days most of my peers refer to comic shop-wise.... when you could go in and find something new.... I get kinda cheesed since by that point (the mid 80's) I was feeling that the selection was ALREADY stymied. Sure, you could get any flavour of Marvel or DC you wanted; but all the REALLY different stuff was already going by the wayside. I had to get stuff right from the publisher, or from them newsprint compilation catalogues the underground/independant distibutors used to put out. (It was like the internet.... on paper!)

So yeah; I went through what a lot of you guys went through a LONG time ago. Don't worry. You'll live. It DOES get better.

Don C.

[thunderbolt]

I mean browsing in person, digging around in boxes, not staring at a computer screen.

[samurainoir]

I'm finding a lot of the old oddball stuff just disappears into the ether or private collections, particularly if it was low print run small press indy.

No one is bothering to digitize much of it because it was initially deemed too niche to begin with, and even mob-selling comic book specialty sites like comiccollectorlive.com or atomicavenue.com don't seem to have much stock too far off the beaten path.

On the other hand, sometimes you do strike it lucky, and if you do know what you are looking for the 'net is indespensible. it's the physical joy of discovery that i'm going to kind of miss... more as a collector rather than reader.

[ctc]

>I mean browsing in person, digging around in boxes, not staring at a computer screen.

You're definitely right, and I very much prefer having an actual book to a screen but for me the goal has always been reading the books themselves. The screen is a small price to pay for a chance to read stuff I'd never read otherwise. The DCM alone has hundreds (if not thousands) of comics WAY to expensive to read. It's a lot of fun to check out something completely odd, and it's great for research since I no longer need to use secondhand assessments of what the olden days were like.

>No one is bothering to digitize much of it because it was initially deemed too niche to begin with

THAT'S a big problem, but I've found a fair number of the old guys are now doing webcomics; and if you can hook into a hub you can see all sorts of weird (NOTE: I didn't say "good") stuff. Again for me, that's not too different from the olden days when different creches of cartoonists would know each other, and you'd get clued into other stuff through someone you were already reading.

Don C.

[Mego Superboy Prime]

Truth is comics have been declining for decades. I part of the problem. I love them but I don't buy them anymore.