But do they? If I ordered 5000 copies of Life With Archie 36 & 37 straight from Archie's website, would Diamond be beating down my front door?

I've ordered Cavewoman comics direct from Amryl Entertainment...the site encourages direct orders, shouldn't all indies be that way?

Not to put anyone out of work, but the end of LCS specialty/niche shops probably would be a great thing for the medium in America, and the only publishers who'd really suffer are Marvel and DC.

Comics don't need to be appended to bookstores or movie stores, but the comics store culture, the store expectations, need a big shake up, because most of the specialty shops are incredibly unwelcoming, often disingenuous, difficult to deal with, and creepy to walk into if it's not already your clubhouse. The occasional Golden Apple or something can't change that.

The problem is that the comics monkey has to swing from the LCS branch to this new, more widely available distribution branch, without either branch breaking and dooming the comics monkey to death

I've been overseas for four years, so now that I'm back in the states, it's pretty surprising how every store in a mall has something superhero related now

I go back and forth on whether comics, and the comics business in particular, attracts a disproportionate number of socially maladjusted individuals. I hear stories all the time about bad experiences in comic shops, and I've had a couple of them myself. It makes me wonder what other business would allow such a large number of people with such poor customer service skills to stay in business. And a logical explanation would be that there are sufficient numbers of other socially maladjusted people to keep them in business such that they have little incentive to improve.  Or that there are sufficiently few respectably run businesses to give them enough competition to make them want to improve.

On the other hand, sometimes I think that it's not that different from any other field where connoisseurs run businesses catering to other connoisseurs -- the record store clerk, the wine/beer snob at the liquor store, etc.  A lot of these places seem to have that one guy whose job it is to look down on people of lesser tastes, find fault in their selections, or speak with thinly veiled contempt when you ask them a question that makes it obvious you are a neophyte in their realm.

Different situation than the States, of course, but most comics in mainland China, where I'm living, are either digital, digital pirates, or bought online, but it's not uncommon to see stores to stock comics purely based around their demographic. A friend of mine likes to ask me to pick up a romance anthology they sell at the front of The Bra Shoppe, a makeup and cute things store decorated with bras to discourage boys/men. If you go by a sports store, there's going to be sports comics for sale. The barber near me has a comics lending library that mostly consists of One Piece at any given moment.

Whoever you are, it's more or less easy to get what comics you want. The Invisibles spiked on Chinese digital sales when comixlology finally started to work functionally here. Who'd have thought The Invisibles would be huge? But there you go. Comics, meaning American, British, French, Japanese, HK, Korean, mainland, or Mexican comics are more or less readily available, unless there are regional content laws, most of which are arguable/negligible when it's comics/drawn. My university students all tend to read some comics, though not the same comics, and my little kids have some comics textbooks, including an awesome elementary school biology/animal diversity book that's almost three hundred pages of two kids and a talking gorilla who doesn't listen to his teacher and just lies/self-aggrandizes all the time. But, because there isn't often one place you can go for everything, unless it's online, it's not so much about browsing as it is targeted purchases. And paper is expensive, copies of things can be expensive, and China tends to look sideways at reproduction rights. It's not uncommon to see a school buy half the copies needed for something and then copy or scan the other half and distribute it stapled or as a pdf. So comics browsing more or less has to take place online, and digital copies are often cheaper (or pirated, or just freely distributed), so...