Every comics shop has one...

[buggery]

There's at least one employee (if you count owner-operators) in every comics shop. Many of us comics readers are wont to refer to the person they deal with at the shop they frequent as "my comicshop guy" or "friendly local comicshop dude" or a similar designation.

Many of these heroes-behind-the-counters share a similar appearance. The owner-operator of the comicshop in the fictional Springfield of Simpsons fame is more a lampooning than a representation of the Comics-Retailer Man type... but the fact remains that there's a noticeable resemblance among the fellows who make sure the titles on our pull lists make it into our pull boxes on a weekly basis.

They look like this, more or less:

Click here to see the Comics-Retailer Man!

My own local Comicshop Guy could've posed for that cover (as the fashion-challenged figure in front, not as the Punisher), aside from his not owning an assault rifle or a Soviet-Russia-themed pink shirt. The haircut and beard are even just the way he was wearing his back over the summer... which means, actually, that it was an even better likeness when the cover was painted.

Hmm.

Comments

[minim_calibre]

I wish Gabriel (my comic book store guy) had a picture of himself up on the store site. He's such a slender almost-pretty ponytailed guy!

His male minions, however, are typical Comics-Retailer Men. (His girl minion, on the other hand, is quite cute. Suspect she may be attached in some respect to Gabriel. She has good taste in comics, unlike most of the male minions.)

(Actually, I've noticed this in other comics stores in Seattle as well. The female employees tend to be very attractive in the alternageek way. I don't know if this is universal.)

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

Hee! My husband, ComicBookMan, owns a store in Connecticut called Legends of Superheros... he and his partner, The Other ComicBookGuy, don't look like that at all. They are very clean cut guys who could be doctors or lawyers or work in an advertising agency for all you'd know to look at them (if they weren't standing behind the counter of a comic book store, that is.) Years ago, ComicBookMan wanted to put an ad in the local Yellowpages, which I set about creating in Powerpoint for them. He wanted a tagline, something quotable, to go at the bottom of the ad in italics. "Come on, think of something!" he said to The Other ComicBookGuy, who put down the Price Guide he was perusing and suggested, deadpan, "How about 'We bathe.'?"