I buy my comics at the Glasgow branch of Forbidden Planet, largely because they're the closest store to my office. And I'm perfectly happy with them.

But there are plenty of you who would doubtless think Forbidden Planet is letting the side down. Because when you enter the store, you do not emerge next to any comics. No, the doorway deposits you in among the DR WHO novels, the film magazines, and the BUFFY DVDs. A similar array of pop cultural detritus surrounds the cash desk. Comics account for a little over half the floor space, but only if you count the bit at the back where they've shoved the back issues.

And this, according to conventional wisdom, is a very bad thing indeed. Because comics stores should be supporting comics. It is their moral duty. They should be pushing new, wonderful and diverse arrays of comics and broadening the tastes of readers. They should be developing the medium, and other such buzzwords. Sure, my store makes a reasonable effort to order new titles from small publishers, but they could do more. They'd much rather be selling trading cards and sci-fi cash-in novels. The bastards.

This vision, of the comic shop as cultural beachhead for graphic storytelling, is certainly very sweet. But it's also missed one fundamental point.

Forbidden Planet, along with a huge part of the direct market, isn't really a comics store at all. Not in the "developing the medium" sense, at least.

Stocking fantasy novels and manga DVDs is a natural fit for these stores. Forbidden Planet is a sci-fi, fantasy and collectibles store. Just look at the name. Now, granted, they built up their business around comics. And this has fooled some people into thinking that they're about comics of all types. To a certain extent they are - they'll stock books like SLOW NEWS DAY, after all - but that's not their top priority.

You might think that because they've built a reasonably successful business on mainstream comics, they would want to extend it into other types of comics. They don't appear to see it that way. They think they've built a customer base of genre fans and the natural way to expand is to sell similar material from other media, which appeals to their existing audience. Not arthouse independent comics that are aiming for a largely different audience.

Intuitively, this seems a perfectly sensible approach. The fantasy novel, trading card and import manga DVD audiences seem like a much more natural fit with the demographic these stores are already attracting. Just because they've focused on one niche market for comics doesn't mean that the best opportunity for expansion lies in products that have nothing much in common other than the fact that they're comics too.

After all, suppose you were running one of those small specialist record stores that stock nothing but dance music. You want to expand. Are you going to do it by selling tickets to club nights and stocking clothing and DJ equipment that appeals to your existing audience? Or are you going to start carrying heavy metal records, on the basis that you have a moral duty to expose your audience to other types of record?

That's pretty much the sort of business that dominates the direct market. The fact that there's no equivalent of the Virgin Megastore carrying mainstream music for mainstream audiences is hardly their problem. It just means we have a distribution system comprised of genre-specific niche stores and bugger all else. And while it would be very nice for us if some of these stores went on a crusade to promote low-selling comics, that doesn't mean it makes any sense for them.

Would you expand a dance music store by carrying heavy metal records? Of course, there are a few stores out there that have bucked the trend, pursued comics as their primary goal, and have apparently done rather well for themselves out of being a pure comics store without filling half the building with Boba Fett action figures. They'll tend to tell you that they make a wonderful living for themselves by shoving X-MEN right at the back of the store (where they'll sell the same amount irrespective of how much you push them) and devote large displays to Fantagraphics and their ilk in order to bring in the casual reader.

And good luck to them. Certainly, if you want to build a wider comics audience then that seems a sensible way of going about it - filling large chunks of your store with superhero comics, action figures and sci-fi DVDs sends a nice loud signal to the passing trade, namely that their preconceptions about comics are correct.

Of course, most stores are aiming at the niche market that finds this signal an attractive one, so that's not necessarily a problem for them. But the store owner who's trying to build an entirely new market of comics readers drawn from the wider public really needs to get as far away from the conventional direct market as possible, or risk positioning his store solidly as Nerd Central.

But then, this also illustrates the problem. In order to sell this sort of material effectively to a non-geek audience, you need to distance yourself pretty thoroughly from the existing core market. If you opened your comic store because, dammit, you liked superheroes and manga - and I'm assuming you can't possibly have opened a comics store in this day and age because you thought it would be a moneyspinner - then this is hardly an attractive option. There is no reason why members of that audience, no matter how intelligent or reasonable, should necessarily be drawn to other comics.

There is a tendency in discussing non-superhero comics to grumble that the dominance of superheroes in the direct market prevents other genres from getting a look in. This is true, but only in the same sense that non-superhero comics are being driven off the shelves of your local butcher by his unreasonable insistence on only stocking meat. It just isn't what those shops set out to be, it isn't in their nature, and there's no earthly reason why it should be.

To sell to a non-geek audience, you need to distance yourself from the existing market. If you want comics stores that focus primarily on other genres, then that's fine. That's a laudable goal. But it's unreasonable to expect the genre-specific stores to expand into that area, which they have no interest in, just because nobody else is doing it. If you want stores like that, you're going to have to create them from scratch, because they're something new that, for the most part, just doesn't exist yet.

To be honest, rather than bemoaning their limited amount of shelf space in the genre and sci-fi dominated world of the direct market, many independent publishers should be counting their blessings that their utterly out-of-place products are being stocked in these places at all. Sure, the alternative is not to be stocked anywhere - but again, that's not Forbidden Planet's problem.

If they ever do emerge on any significant scale, "mainstream" comics stores - in the ever-misused sense of "other genres we stubbornly maintain would be mainstream if anyone actually bought them" - might prove to be a mere transitional phase. After all, if they do succeed in establishing a genuine mainstream audience for new types of comics, the book stores and the newsstands - depending on format - will jump on board soon enough. And the natural home of comics, as a mainstream cultural force, is in those kinds of stores. Still, that's a long way off yet.

In the meantime, if a new type of comic store is what you want, it's no use just waiting for the direct market to turn into that, because it's never going to happen. It's like having a one-legged cat and deciding that the reason it can't run is because something's wrong with the one leg. In an ideal world, these stores would be the equivalent of niche genre-specific bookstores. But then, they already are. It's just the rest of the market that's missing. Not their fault, and not their responsibility to fix.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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