I personally have had both negative and positive encounters in comic shops (and at cons), and all the negatives ones related directly to my gender. And it’s rare that I go into a comic shop and don’t drop $20-40 at least twice a week. I am lucky to live in a place where I have a variety of stores to choose from.

I feel like there needs to be a woman-owned comic store that does what Babeland and Good Vibrations did for sex stores, which is really apt, but inappropriate comparison. Because Peter David and the men who followed you around the comic store and the ones who point me to the manga section really don’t know what’s best.

Of course, I stopped going as much after I hit puberty, because I was wearing a Catholic school uniform, and I had boobs. This isn’t the sort of attention you want to draw in your local comic shop. The employees would follow me around. CREEPY. (This behavior didn’t happen as much when I walked in with a guy. Fail, comic book dudes. Epic fail.)

What I really WANT, however, is a girl-owned comic book shop. With an all-female staff. (If it were a comic book and gaming shop both? Ideal. So ideal.) One that I could go into and bitch like hell about cover art, or the latest annoying plotline, and I can hear back something I can relate to. I have a harder time relating to guys who like comics. We just like different things about them.

So instead, I have my internet friends, and I seek out women who like comics, and geek out with them. So I get annoyed when someone (like Peter David) tries to take that away from me in a fit of “I know better than you do.” When, really, he doesn’t.

@Caroline — I definitely agree that there were pissed off members going too far. And that there are other communities for discovering comics, though I’m not sure there is an easy remedy for Scans_daily’s core group. For me, I got more recs out of Girl-Wonder.org, but for me, feminist comics (or comics with more than two women talking to each other about non-men stuff) is more important for my reading.

@Thomas Rau — I don’t know Peter David personally so I can’t judge whether or not he’s a liar. Even if he’d only heard of Scans_daily recently, it doesn’t change that he did get into an argument there and have it shut down at the same time, which tinges it with personal offense, not just professional copyright protection. I did go to his blog to read his post about Scans_daily and then I read the post before it, which declared that racism was dead since white people elected Obama. That post made me more pissed off than the entire kerfuffle about Scans_daily. I would link, but it seems like someone hacked his site.

So you believe he is lying when he says he never heard of the place until very recently? I don’t think he is. At the moment, he may be all kinds of things to you, but he’s not a liar. Many commenters on the blog admit to also never having heard of SD, world-famous as it may be in your part of the web. Perpetuating this idea is understandable, but not helpful.

Also, while I don’t at all doubt that S_D turned a lot of people on to comics they ended up buying, and that it was a good center for discussion for a lot of people, I feel like most of the positives that people are associating with the community could be accomplished in other forums.

As for Peter David, well, I don’t have a lot of use for diva artists and creators no matter how good (or bad) they were at what they did, and although perhaps there were concerns for copyright violations, it sounds like David could have shut it down earlier. The timing sounds a bit too linked to his recent disagreements with those who would criticize his work. I agree, very unprofessional.