Every Sunday at Bat City Comic Professionals, Shannon Live grabs a stack of new direct market releases, opens a bottle of wine, and starts livestreaming on YouTube, spending the next 90 minutes talking comics and cabernet. Part wine club and part comics week in review, Live’s Wine Down Your Weekend also finds an audience on Facebook, creating in-store buzz (in more ways than one) at the shop, which she co-owns with her husband, Matt Live, in Bradenton, Fla.

“The number one thing I hear from viewers,” Live says, “is that they watch the show on Monday at work—sorry to the bosses of the world—and make a list of what they want to buy.”

Live, who is also VP, director of education at ComicsPRO, is part of a wave of comics retailers creating BookTok-style, personable videos to boost business. Armed with props like puppets, or booze, and with the bursting shelves of their stores as backdrops, these booksellers—who are often younger, and notably, often women—aim to change the lingering stereotype of the grouchy and forbidding Simpsons-type comic shop clerk.

And it seems to be working for their bottom lines.


Batman and beyond

All the half dozen social-media-savvy retailers that PW spoke with reported their individual store sales were up. That’s on trend for the industry, as ICv2 reports a near 30% increase in sales for 2025 over 2024.

ICv2’s data and retailers also point to the same chart-topper titles: DC Comics’ Absolute Universe series, which relaunched classic superheroes like Batman and Wonder Woman with reimagined backstories. (Batman, for example, is the son of a public school teacher instead of a billionaire scion.)

Live says the series has captured one elusive audience in particular: Gen Z. “Absolute everything is selling like crazy,” she notes, “and it brings in a new audience.”

Retailers and publishers have long awaited a direct-market title that could build a bridge for the generation of readers that made the Dog Man middle grade series a bestseller. “The 20-year-old audience has finally found their comic that draws them into the shop,” Live adds. And that very-online demographic is poised to like and subscribe as a way to stay connected to their local store.

The Absolute Batman series by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta is the bestselling comic at the Geekery, owned by brothers Doug and Justin Preston and located in Matawan, N.J. The shop is also home to a rising social media star: Bruce the Muppet.

Bruce was born a few years ago after the Preston brothers—at first reluctantly—turned to influencer tactics to help boost business. They sourced a mid-aughts make-your-own-Muppet kit from eBay. Each Wednesday, for new comics day, the puppet hops on Doug Preston’s arm for a reel released on Instagram and TikTok. Off camera, Preston also voices Bruce, who lists every issue released that day—all in one take. Customers frequently come in later and tease Preston about stumbling over pronunciations or losing his breath.

“I was like, I definitely do not want to be on camera,” Preston says. “But I know video helps.”

Bruce’s vids include him chatting with comics creators, such as Jason Aaron and Chip Zdarsky, often wearing his custom T-shirt from Mad Cave Studios. The puppet also narrates Preston’s book reviews, which tend to favor indie series like 4 Kids Walk into a Bank by Matthew Rosenberg, Tyler Boss, and Thomas Maur from Black Mask Studios, resulting in in-store sales bumps.

All of this raises the question, with capes-and-tights fare soaring on charts, shouldn’t comics shop reels also be dominated by superheroes? The Prestons and other shop owners who spoke with PW said no. Absolute, whose audience is still growing (all the series’ issues have gone into multiple printings), seems to sell itself.

“No matter how much I order of Absolute Batman, it’s never enough,” Doug Preston says. “For issue 15, I ordered more than I did of 14, and it sold out at 4 p.m. Wednesday.”

Retailers are using reels to upsell independent comics and other personal picks, especially for those younger fans who’ve likely got the Dark Knight and brethren in their pull box.


Uncurbed enthusiasm

To endure slim margins and long hours, retailers simply must love comics—and this frank enthusiasm is the hook for their videos.

“It’s literally just me being like, Oh my god, I read this book, guys, and you’re going to love it,” Live says of Wine Down Your Weekend. In most episodes, she goes all out for indies—viewers are most likely to hear Live talk up series like Nights by Wyatt Kennedy and Luigi Formisano, which is a supernatural coming-of-age rom-com from Image, or the Eisner-nominated small-town mystery comic Minor Arcana by Jeff Lemire, from Boom! Studios.

Tessa Gray, another indie enthusiast, oversees three locations of Cloud City Comics in eastern Pennsylvania, from which she also boosts the less heralded comics she loves to her nearly 7,500 followers on Instagram. She says her reels have helped the store pull in younger readers. “So many people on TikTok are younger, and they want to know what’s good first before they spend the little money they have,” she adds. “Comics is an inherently community-driven hobby, and that’s how I do my social media. It’s more like chatting with friends than go buy this book.”

Gray says her favorite series of 2025 was No Place by Tim Seeley and Stefano Simeone, from newly launched Ignition Press. It follows an organization that monitors portal fantasy worlds, and it stars Dorothy Gale inspired by The Wizard of Oz. Other indie picks include Skin Deep by Flo Woolley, from Silver Sprocket, and Kill Your Darlings by Ethan S. Parker, Griffin Sheridan, and Bob Quinn, from Image.

While retailers like Gray and Live are making their own content individually, other shop owners have banded together. Jen King started selling comics in 1992 at an Oklahoma City flea market. She now owns Space Cadets Collection Collection in Shenandoah, Tex. She’s also the cofounder of The Experience, a network of comics YouTube shows with nearly 3,500 subscribers and 25,000 monthly views.

Started just before the Covid pandemic as The Comic Book Shopping Experience, the network was, at first, primarily used for web-based sales. That has continued, but its content has since evolved into a mix of sales shows and informational segments, hosted by retailers who span the country, from Florida to California.

The Experience also has two full-time producers, and programming that ranges from a showcase highlighting titles with looming direct-market stocking deadlines to a rapid-fire reviews show, Minute to Skim It, and a creator interview show hosted by King called Talkin’ Shop. The network helps participating retailers build communities that start online and continue in person at their stores—and vice versa.

“Every month we’re finding new ways to reach people and get them to engage with us,” King says.

By stepping out from behind the counter and directly into readers’ social media feeds, comics shop owners are making newbie fans feel welcome. “When they see what people are like in the community, and how we talk to each other, they realize, Oh wait, they’re just like my friends,” King explains. “I’m not any different in person. The person they see on the screen is really me.”

Zack Quaintance is a Brooklyn-based journalist and comic book creator.

Read more from our comics retailing feature.

Calling All Martians: PW talks with Deniz Camp