Safe Comic Book stores for kids, ladies, transgendered and everyone else

DSC_6341 (Photo credit: Dan Morrill)

Something tells me I am going to really like 2013 because of this. We have all heard the same old story, about how women have a hard time feeling comfortable let alone spending enough time in comic book stores. When I go to places like Geek Girl Con, and other everyone else friendly comic book events, I am so happy that my friend Robb Orr sent over this article from Crisp Comics about safe comic book stores.

I feel like we are moving from the back lot to the main stream when I am writing this one, because everyone should feel safe when they are in your store. If they don’t feel safe they don’t come back, they don’t spend money, and they will talk about it on Yelp or somewhere else. Your store loses, that is the important part, and ticking off your customer base is no way to keep your company open.

Christine Brunson has an awesome article over here at Crisp Comics, which then leads you to this amazing site called “Safe Places for Comics Fans”.

The sad part is that we need this; the good part is that we have this tumblr site now, and as we are a small, vocal, amazingly interesting community the word of this site will spread fast. They state on their web site:

Comic shops are notoriously hit and miss when it comes to being inclusive of women, lgbt, PoC, and other minority comics’ fans. This tumblr is for you to share your positive or negative comic shop experiences, so that fellow comics’ fans can find friendly local comic shops, and be warned of which shops to avoid.

And they mean it, a good review looks like this:

Store Name: is one of my favorite places to be. My teenage daughter and I have always welcome there, and inclusion of every customer is a given, as is respect and humour. The staff is warm and knowledgable and silly, and the shop’s owner has come to my middle school classroom to talk to my students about the history of graphic novels and comics. Their guest speaker/signing events have always been diverse. The men and women working at Atlantis treat everyone as a welcome customer and member of a very extended family.

And a negative review looks like this:

Do not go here. It is poorly lit, cramped, up a long flight of steps and utterly terrifying. Staff is rude and uncooperative towards women and those they perceive as LGBTQA (unknown towards other minorities).

Be on notice people, crowd sourcing your comic book store’s future are sites like this, and as customer experiences go, these are pretty straight forward. While some reviews might show up on Yelp, it is going to be locally produced and curated sites like this that will carry the most weight with the comic book crowd, boys, girls, and everyone else in between. We really should try to be nice to each other, and make sure that when you decide what con to go to, if friendly and inclusive matters to you, then Geek Girl Con in Seattle is going to be the show you are going to want to go to this year.