I hate to say this, but never before has it been so easy and so user friendly to buy comic books through the mail.  The Internet now presents visual slide shows of comics that are just a click away, plug in your credit card number and soon any comic under the moon is headed for your door.  What this means for comic books shops is simple: they have become the land of the new comic book, the book you can get faster than through a mail service, and their collections of old comics are getting more and more pitiful as a result.

For years the best way to find old issues was to use one of the many mail order sites that advertised incessantly in the pages of Marvel and DC comics.  The only problem there was that they were always upping the prices of back issues to levels that I thought were unrealistic.  This didn't mean I didn't use the old system. I remember coming home from summer camp one year and having a big cardboard box full of comics waiting for me.  The pleasure I experienced shifting through the massive haul is hard to express in adult terms: think "new car" maybe, or "new stereo." I read for days as my mosquito bites healed and I slowly became rehydrated.  Mail order was fast and efficient, but now it is so easy as to make impulsive behavior very dangerous.

I recently filled out all the holes in my collection of West Coast Avengers using mycomicbookshop.com.  The process was fascinating.  I saw the cover of every comic I was buying, and within about ten minutes my cart was ready and my order out in the ether.  When the comics came just four days later I was thrilled, and realized this was less lag time than just waiting a week between the new comic books coming out in the stores.  And I got deals!  Some comics were less than their cover price, and almost all of them were cheaper than their contemporary counterparts.  It's amazing how many old comics from the 80s and 90s you can get for under 4$, which is fast becoming the reigning average for new books.  I try not to think about what I would like to buy, because with a few clicks of a mouse I could be inside that cornocopia of good buys and ready to shell out all my dollars to fix a hole in a collection here, a hole in a collection there.

The comic book shops of today, and I know there are exceptions, rely heavily on the new books to keep their doors open.  Superior Comics, where I shop, have a ton of comic books and graphic novels in good condition, but these books are 99% new.  A handful of long boxes showcase stuff on sale for 50 cents a piece, but there is always different stuff blocking the ability to look through them.  It has become just another table in their store, where tons of fans work over the new comics with passion and excitement.  I love supporting a local business but I need that local business to suport my needs or I just go on-line.

Is the Internet the big Wal-Mart of the global economy?  Kind of.  While Wal-Mart rules the retail chains, the Internet has everything and this is, in my humble opinion, a good thing.  Why should you have to pay double prices on anything because you have decided to live in a rural community without stores that provide everything you are after?  The proliferation of comic book lovers has required virtual stores become active, just as when Sears and LL Bean started their catalogue blitzkrieg so many years ago.  Sometimes people don't have a choice.

My only fear is that in time, with on-line shops replacing small stores, there will be no camaraderie, no conversations to overhear about the best comics of the week, no way to judge just who makes up comic book fandom, and all of this I would surely miss if I used on-line resources exclusively.  So for now I have the best of both worlds and generally try and protect my wallet from my own lust for the medium that I have been writing about for almost a month now. (Phew, this is almost over...)