Am I the only one whose store is arranged by title?

Nope. My store arranges by title. New releases on one shelf. More recent releases on another shelf. And then older stuff in boxes and bags.

Not sure how the trades are organized. They keep them behind the counter for some reason.

I don't understand. It's only publisher-oriented to the publishers. Stores don't shelve books by publisher, or CDs by record company, or DVDs by studio. Because that'd obviously be insane. Why make it as difficult as possible for your potential customer to find a title?

I can see what you mean - but I don't think it's like shelving books by publisher, or CDs by label, because the CDs or books in that scenario are not interlocking cogs in a big, messy machine. They're self contained. But that's not the case with comics. What makes sense to me about shelving comics by Publisher is that this means you're closer to shelving them by 'verse. Because so many of (all?) the DC titles are set in the same shared universe, and have characters and contexts and backstory in common, and ditto Marvel for their shared universe(I can't speak for the other publishers though). And if you're a total newbie, that's actually quite helpful, surely? To know that all the books in this section are liable to relate to one another?

I mean, I'm not denying that it's an imperfect scheme, but I don't think it's crazy.

It's helpful only if you're a newbie who's into DC or Marvel superhero comics. If you're a newbie (or infrequent comics reader) looking for something else and don't happen to know the name of the publisher, it's unbelievably confusing.

(And speaking of RASL upthread, I would love to discuss the 3rd issue, but I got 2 pages in and realized I needed to reread the first 2 because I have no idea what's happening. This is why I prefer trades.)

Exactly. I don't read superhero books much. And when I do, it's almost always because of the author. Reading NextWave is not going to get me to care about the X-Men, so shelving them near each other doesn't do anything for me.

And it is done that way with other publishers. Casanova and Phonogram aren't part of a shared universe* but they're both Image books, so they'll often be shelved together.

*Although if they were, that would be a particularly awesome universe.

If you're a newbie (or infrequent comics reader) looking for something else and don't happen to know the name of the publisher, it's unbelievably confusing.

When Fray got me back into comics, I also started buying Ultimate Spider-Man (my Batman -- and Blue Beetle -- obession started much later). And I couldn't figure out why the comics were separate the way they were (i.e., not alphabetically by title).

But honestly, it didn't take me more than 1 visit to the store to figure out they were separated by publisher. The publisher's logos are pretty prominent on the covers, so even though I often miss the obvious, I twigged to it pretty easily.

I'm not implying that everyone should figure it out that quickly -- obviously, not everyone does -- but I still don't think it's all that weird to separate the books by publisher. Fay's point about the (more-or-less) shared universes is a good one.

But honestly, it didn't take me more than 1 visit to the store to figure out they were separated by publisher.

This isn't the confusing part. It's having to remember who the damn publisher is in the first place. (Which isn't ever necessary in any other kind of bookstore.)

This isn't the confusing part. It's having to remember who the damn publisher is in the first place. (Which isn't ever necessary in any other kind of bookstore.)

Right, but if you think of Publisher as the comic world version of Genre, which it largely is (and my store separates the titles for kids into their own sub-section), then it makes a lot more sense. I often have a hard time finding things in my regular bookstores when I'm not sure which genre section something's going to be shelved in, and it usually takes me longer to track it down there than it does for me to find where the indie comics are kept, and then find the title.

I get why they're separated by publisher, but ultimately I think there's no downside to arranging them alphabetically.

Whereas there's an obvious downside to displaying them sorted by publisher.

there's an obvious downside to displaying them sorted by publisher.

Depends. With "events" like Marvel's Secret Wars (or is it Secret Invasion? Secret something, in any case) or, let's say, DC's Yet Another Crisis, the storyline crosses over into a lot of different titles, some of which might not be -- hell, probably aren't -- on a reader's pull list.

The publisher wants to get people to buy all the crossover titles. And many readers want to buy all the crossover titles, so they can make sense of what's going on. But if you don't *know* that (for instance) Yet Another Crisis is running through Batman, Teen Titans, Superman, and Secret Six, and your only pull out of those 4 titles is Superman, then you'd have to walk up and down the long-ass alphabetically arranged wall of comics from all publishers until you (hopefully) saw whatever splash banner DC came up with to put on covers to promote Yet Another Crisis.

Now, even if comics are arranged by publisher, if you still only have Superman in your pull list, you have to scan all the covers to find the crossovers for Yet Another Crisis, but it's still a lot fewer covers to scan than if you were looking at every single cover from every single publisher.

I realize that my example is more favorable to the publisher than the reader, b/c the publisher *wants* the reader to buy as many titles as they can be conned into buying. But I still maintain my position that a lot of readers want to read all (or most) of the titles in a crossover event, and it's in a publisher's -- and the comic store's -- best interest to make that as easy as possible. It's a win-win-win.