Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a story on the resurgence of Archie Comics. There’s this quote in there from movie producer (and Archie Comics writer) Michael Uslan:

“I hate to denigrate comic book stores,” says Michael Uslan, a comic book historian and the writer of the wedding story line. “They are wonderful, but for a kid to buy an Archie comic or for a parent to buy an Archie comic for a kid, they are not going to go to a walk-up in a bad part of town.”

I don’t see anyone having a problem with that, do you? Cue up hurt feelings in 3, 2, 1…

For me, I’ve been to comic book stores in lots of major US cities (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Scottsdale, Portland, Seattle, Las Vegas, Chicago, Atlanta, Honolulu, Waikiki, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC to name a few), and lots of smaller towns and cities (I’m looking at you, Roanoke, VA and Ventura, CA), plus a few Canadian cities (Toronto! Vancouver!), as well as London, England. Let’s say it’s probably 150 of them overall. Some have been in shopping malls, others in strip malls, and still others as stand-alones. Some storefronts, and some where I had to (gasp) walk down stairs or up stairs. I haven’t found any of them in a part of town that would make me think twice about leaving my car parked down the street.

Here’s a Robot 6 link to a story about some great comic book stores as reported by Wired.

[Artwork: Sheldon and Wolowitz visit the comic book store in The Big Bang Theory]