The friendly local game, comic or music shop is an endangered species. Here's why we should work hard to save them.

I walked up to the register and set down Top Ten Volume 2, Transmetropolitan Volume 3, and Lost Girls. The familiar smell created by tens of thousands of pages hung in the air, and the tinny sound of an anime soundtrack played out of a single speaker on a 13-inch television at the end of the counter.

"How are you today, Wil?" The owner of my Friendly Local Comic Shop asked me.

"I'm doing great," I said. "Can you believe that these books are a business expense?"

"How'd you manage that?"

"I'm write a weekly column about geek things, and I'm working on a story about Alan Moore." I said. "It started out as something I thought I could do in a week; that was two months and about three hundred dollars ago."

"How's it going?" He said, as he wrote down the titles I'd purchased.

"I'm not sure," I said, "because I haven't written a single word of it, yet.

"The whole thing started out as a column about movies that were adapted from comic books. I wanted to do a few that were good, and a few that totally sucked. The good ones began and ended with Sin City, and the bad ones were too numerous to count."

"What about the original Batman?" He said.

"It's close, but what the hell is Alfred thinking, just bringing Vicki Vale into the Batcave without talking to Bruce Wayne about it? It's like he says, 'You know, Master Bruce, I've thought about it, and it's time you reveal your secret identity to this newspaper reporter. I'll leave you two alone to talk.'"

"Good point," he said.

"It tends to piss off fanboys when I say that," I said. "Anyway, there are lots of Alan Moore titles which have just been butchered—"

"Like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," we said together.

"V for Vendetta was fine on its own," I said, "but as an adaptation it sort of changes the fundamental message of the book . . ."

"What about Spiderman?" One of the other guys behind the counter said.

"It's deeply flawed," I said, "but I really liked a lot of it. The whole beginning, where Peter Parker is discovering his powers was awesome, but after that it sort of went off the rails."

A guy in line behind me spoke up. "Totally agree with you, dude."

Uh-oh. I had an audience. I couldn't help myself: "We could relate to it, right? It was so cool to watch this guy who's such a nerd finally get all that stuff that we all want to have ourselves, you know? Standing up to the bully, getting the girl . . . uh, being Spiderman . . . I wanted to see more of that stuff, and less of 'you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us' and 'I'm Mary Jane, and I'm a bitch, but Peter Parker still loves me for some reason.'"

"Oh!" the owner said. "I have a book you're going to love."

He walked into the back of the shop, and returned with a DC graphic novel.

"This is Kinetic," he said. "It's about this kid who's really sickly and weak and nerdy, and how he discovers these powers that he has. If you liked the beginning of Spiderman, I think you'll really like this."

I opened it up and thumbed through it. The artwork and coloring were beautiful, what I imagine Black Hole would look like if it were color and more mainstream.

"That looks cool," I said. I wondered if I could justify adding another book to my list, which was already more than I intended to spend (Damn you, Warren Ellis.)

"You can have that," he said.

"Really?" I said.

"Yeah. Check it out. I want to hear what you think of it next time you come in."

"Thanks, man!" I said. I paid him, happily walked to my car, and sang along with They Might Be Giants as I drove home.

Contrast this with an experience I had at a local chain bookstore over the weekend:

It was noisy and crowded, typical for the mall on a Saturday afternoon. My wife walked deep into the store to pick up whatever book she wanted, and I went over to the graphic novel aisle, just past the Sci-Fi section.

The aisle was just as crowded as the rest of the store, and a couple of teens sat on the floor looking through Manga books.

I tried to find Transmetropolitan Volume 3, but the shelves were messy and disorganized. I couldn't find it, but I did see The Best American Comics (2006), which I pulled off the shelf and flipped through. I'd heard about it a few weeks ago, and thought it may be worth purchasing.

While I flipped through (initially unimpressed, but intrigued nonetheless) a store manager appeared at the end of the aisle.

"Okay, all of you guys have to get out of here," he said.

I looked up. Some of the kids there joined me.

"You heard me," he said, sharply, "this isn't some place for you to sit down and read. If you want to buy something, take it to the register."

Okay, that's fair enough. It's not a library, and it's not a daycare center . . . but did he have to be such a jerk about it? Most of the kids were standing, and looked like they were trying to decide which book they wanted to buy. The three kids who were on the floor stood up and left. A teenage couple, who were standing next to me trying to decide between a couple books disgustedly shoved them all back onto the shelf, and walked away. The guy half of the couple muttered "Dick" as he passed me.

I wasn't sitting down, and I was legitimately browsing, so I stayed there and continued to flip through the book.

"Excuse me?" The manager said to me. "Are you going to buy that?"

I slowly closed the book, and placed it back on the shelf. I turned to face him.

"No." I said. "No, I am not."

I walked out of the store and waited for my wife.

I don't know how much money the store lost as a result of that manager's behavior, but I was fairly certain that it lost a few customers and did nothing to foster a good reputation among the teenagers in our community.

In an increasingly globalized world where vertically-integrated multi-national companies storm into communities, reduce our choices and homogenize our shopping experience, the Friendly Local Shop is an endangered species, and it's not just comic and book shops that are at risk.

The Friendly Local Game Shop
When I was a teenager and discovered that board games could be more challenging and complex than Monopoly, I also discovered my Friendly Local Game Shop. It was called The Last Grenadier, and it was in a pedestrian mall in Burbank (The Grenadier was right next door to the bike shop in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, for those of you who enjoy visuals which feature an 80s icon, Danny Elfman, and San Fernando Road.)

I went in there at least once a week, and it didn't take long for me to establish a personal relationship with the owners. They'd introduce me to new games, hold games for me that they knew I'd like (I got Hacker this way, because I was such a nerd for Illuminati) and occasionally let me take games home to demo with my friends. They cared about me as a customer. Because they took the time to get to know me personally, I was loyal, and often drove there instead of to a shop in the mall where I could get things for less.

They moved to a new location, on Hollywood Way, and I moved to a new house, in Pasadena. I grew up, and started a family, but I can still go back there and it's like no time has passed at all.

The Friendly Local Music Shop.
These are falling away faster than you can say Wal*Mart, and of all the Friendly Locals, they are the ones I miss the most. The days of spending over an hour walking aisles, buying CDs just because they looked cool and talking with other customers and hardcore music geeks who excitedly shove headphones on you so you can hear Mingus at Antibes, are essentially over as we buy more of our music online, or big box retailers move into communities and undercut indie stores and force them out of business.

There was a store in Montrose, very close to where I grew up in La Crescenta, that we just called "the record store." We called it that for so long, I have no idea what its real name was, but it was a very cool place, like the fictional store in Empire Records, or an Amoeba Music that was small enough for the employees to know you if you shopped there frequently. It was in this store in the early 90s that the owner (an aging rocker guy who looked like Gene Simmons without makeup and with just a hint of Alice Cooper) said to me, "Hey, Wil, I have a record you're going to love."

"Oh yeah?" I said, "What is it?"

"You like Enigma, right?"

Who didn't like Enigma? (And if you were in your late teens or early 20s when MCMXC a.D. came out, who didn't imagine what it would be like to do it with the unattainable object of your affection in a candle-lit room while that record played?)

"Yeah," I said, "Enigma's pretty cool."

"This is an album that's just as groundbreaking."

He handed me Underworld's Dubnobasswithmyheadman. I bought it, and it took all of thirty seconds of Dark & Long for me to put it on heavy rotation just about everywhere I went in my life. While I may have come across that album on my own, it's unlikely that I would have actually picked it up, or even listened to it. It brought me a lot of joy when I lived in Nice the following year on location for a movie, and now whenever I hear Mmm Skyscraper I Love You I get a sense memory of standing in my kitchen, looking across the rooftops of nearby buildings at the Mediterranean Sea each morning as I made my breakfast. And Dirty Epic is about this girl who—okay. I have to stop. I'm married, now.

Save the Friendly Locals!
Of course, you don't need a Friendly Local for any of these things. If you're lucky, you have friends who can introduce you to new games and artists, but as you get older and all of your time has more demands placed upon it, the chances for any of you to stumble upon something new to share with each other diminish (I speak from experience) and having a good relationship with a Friendly Local Shop owner can be the difference between discovering something that enriches your life, and just another night in front of the television.

In addition to the obvious benefits of keeping money and jobs in our local communities, it's in our best interests to support our Friendly Locals. For example:

While you may be able to save a few bucks on a CD at Target, if you have a Friendly Local Music Shop and go there instead, the owner may see you picking up Interpol, and suggest Joy Division. They may see you picking up The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and throw themselves between you and the register, just to save you from yourself.

While you may be able to get 10% off if you use your preferred customer card at the bookstore in the mall, is cranky manager guy going to take the time to talk with you, and suggest a graphic novel you may have missed, like Kinetic?

While you may be able to save a few bucks on the latest d20 source book in that same bookstore (if they stock it, that is) don't count on stumbling across any new games, like the boxed version of Kill Doctor Lucky, or High School Drama. And I can guarantee you that the bookstore in the mall won't stay open late because the owner really wants to do a Shadowrun one-off, and will provide pizza and Mountain Dew for any players who show up this Friday at 7.

The Friendly Local Game, Comic, and Music shops are almost always owned and staffed by people who are as passionate about the products they sell as their customers are who buy them[1], but passion isn't enough to keep a business open and flourishing, especially in today's world. Some of these shops—especially the game shops—are load bearing pillars in their community's particular subcultures, and if we geeks don't support them, who will?

If you have one in your community, think about heading out to one the next time you have some disposable income. You may just create a valuable relationship with someone just as geeky as you are, but more importantly, you'll ensure that the next generation of geeks has the same opportunity.

[1] Obvious exception made for annoying Comic Book Guys, who are not without their own unique charm.

Wil Wheaton used to buy records at Licorice Pizza and Aaron's Records, back before you were born.