....if before there were home computers, you owned tens of thousands of comics and had index cards of each title with a checklist on each card of the issue numbers you owned and needed a half dozen index card boxes to store them and every week you checked off the new comics you bought and you did this for many, many years and fretted when publishers changed names of titles like Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man to just Peter Parker because now you have to decide if those new title books go on a separate index card as well as deciding how to file the actual book in your alphabetically arranged long boxes which is filling up your apartment and are stacked so high that you'll never look at the ones you have on the bottom unless the stack falls over in the middle of the night and you think there was an earthquake that occurred but no its a catastrophe of hundreds of comics tumbling out of their boxes and your not going to get a good nights sleep because you have a big clean up project that literally fell in your lap and your downstairs neighbor complained to the landlord about the huge noise that woke him too in the middle of the night and your landlord stopped by to tell you about the complaint and he sees all the comic book boxes in your apartment and thinks your some weird hoarder and tells you this could be a fire hazard and....... 

I always made sure my wallet could fit both. I might have been a nerd but I wasn't stupid

....as a teenager I kept my comic book collection hidden from my girlfriend, much deeper in hiding then my porno collection

That's easy. Pretty much any high street newsagent in the UK.

Not in the US where you have to find one of only about 5000 specialty shops scattered through all 50 states. and considering there are about 15-20 of them clustered within a 45 minute drive of where I live, that means there are vast stretches of the country where there is no place to get new comic books because there are no shops and newsagents don't carry them.

-M

It's at least an hour and 45 minute drive from my house to the nearest comic book shop.  Consequently, I haven't purchased a comic from a comic book shop in over a decade. 

We are pretty much halfway between two medium-large cities (Columbus & Dayton) and I live in a densely populated river valley where there are lots of bedroom communities for both. Columbus is 45 minutes away and has 6-8 comic shops, the greater Dayton area including all those bedroom communities has about 6-8 comic shops and a half hour the other side of Dayton is Cincinnati (and across the river from there Lexington, KY another metropolitan area) and there are a number of other shops there. Cincinnati/Lexington has 2 major cons a few weeks apart in the fall, Dayton has 1 major con and Columbus has a Wizard World, Pulp Fest (one of the biggest pulp cons in North America) and Origins (the 2nd largest gaming convention in the US after Gen Con-which is in Indy only a couple hours away). Not all the shops thrive (in fact one of the 2 in my town is closing in the next week or so mostly because the second one opened up last fall) but most do enough to survive. There are also 4-6 successful vintage toy stores in the area, a couple of gaming-centric stores that don't carry comics, several antique malls and a some very good used book sellers that specialize in sci-fi and fantasy. There are also 5 Half Price Book stores in the region and a Second and Charles which carry used books, comics, and some toys and games as well It is a pretty rich region for geek culture and products.

-M