There's been a lot of loose talk in the industry lately about the 'death of the comic book.'  I should know since I've been doing a lot of it here (where I've been condemned for slurring the noble 32 page color format comic by tarring it with the disrespectful epithet 'pamphlet').  Combine that with recent ICv2 headlines stating that graphic novels have started to outsell comic books and it's not hard to accept the supposition we're getting close to the tipping point where more customers 'wait for the trades' rather than pick up the monthlies.

And hard to shake the conclusion that if the monthly comic book isn't exactly dead, you could definitely see its sell-by date.

But the strange thing is that's really not the case at Dark Star.  Sure, graphic novels are strong sellers but sales on comic books are up across the board.  And when I took one of my infrequent 'inspection' tours of other comic book shops in Southeast Ohio and talked to the people running them I was told pretty much the same thing.

And it's not just the sales of new comics; the really interesting thing to me is the sales of the not-new comics.  At our store, like in many comic book shops, there are three areas where we sell comics; New Comics (Wednesday's new releases), Back Issues (where comics that have been bagged, boarded and priced are kept in open long boxes),and that shelf where we kept the previous weeks comics.  And the ones from the week before, and the week before that.

At Dark Star we have a truism that goes 'once a new comic book makes it ways into the back issues boxes the chances of it actually selling are pretty slim.'  If it's going to sell it's much more likely to do it off the shelves, which is why we try to keep at least three months worth of Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse and Vertigo titles there.

Thanks to databases and spreadsheets, what once was a truism is now verifiable fact: we're selling a lot of comic books off of that shelf.  Last time I talked about how we literally couldn't keep in stock recent runs of titles featuring characters I would have classified as third-tier (at best) like Iron Fist, Ghost Rider, and Moon Knight.  I would have sworn there was little (if any) fan interest in them but then, these days I'm frequently flummoxed by the amount of enthusiasm I'm seeing for today's product.

I'm not personally crazy about Civil War and its aftermath, and after seeing the mini-series that spun out of House of M I'd have bet money the fans would feel the same way, but apparently there's enough readers interested in the 'new reality' in the Marvel Universe they're buying anything with a Civil War banner on it to get caught up.  Here, clearly, is a case of people who could wait for the trades...but don't want to.

And, finally, let's talk about all those 'literary comics' I was pushing so hard last week.  Marvel certainly could have sold Gunslinger #1 and #2 together in, say, a 56 page format that included the background material from the free sketchbook and sold it for $6.99 -- doubling their profits on those theoretical 200,000 copies (not that the $3.99 price tag wasn't high enough, thank you).  I'm guessing the majority of Stephen King fans coming into a direct sales shop for the first time (at least in a long time) wouldn't have gone into sticker shock (I mean, haven you seen the price of a paperback book these days?).

In the same way Dark Horse could have released the first half of Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer arc as a little 'instant paperback' to give fans of the shows more of a taste of what the series was going to be like - while also putting the material into a format they're more likely to be familiar with.

But the thing of it is, is, this last month when I've sold all those copies of Buffy, Anita Blake, and Gunslinger I didn't once came across a single customer who balked at the format, thinking it wasn't substantial enough or too expensive.  Maybe it's because we're in the middle of one of those brief periods in American life when the comic book carries with it a cool cache, or maybe when it comes to sampling a comic book series you really can't do much better than the good old 'floppy.'

Take Free Comic Book Day; which we will be taking up next time.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.