>Things From Another World is closing. Dark Horse announced yesterday that its two Oregon retail locations in Milwaukie and Beaverton will shut on June 30, 2026, with the California store at Universal CityWalk following on September 30. The e-commerce site, TFAW.com, went dark in April 2025 after 25 years of operation. >The closure is not a minor footnote. Mike Richardson opened his first store, Pegasus Fantasy Books, as a 400-square-foot shop in Bend, Oregon in 1980. That store became Things From Another World, which became a chain of eleven locations at its peak, and the revenue from that chain funded the launch of Dark Horse Comics in 1986. Dark Horse became the third-largest comics publisher in the United States — the home of Hellboy, Sin City, the Alien and Predator licenses, Star Wars comics during their pre-Marvel era, and decades of creator-owned work that could not find a home at the Big Two. The store that built the publisher is now gone.>Richardson was fired from Dark Horse in March 2026 by new owners Embracer Group, on the eve of the company’s 40th anniversary. Dark Horse frames the TFAW closure as part of modernizing operations and building a more connected organization under Fellowship Entertainment. In plain language: the corporate owners who replaced the founder decided the retail chain he built was not worth keeping.>The closure lands inside a direct market that has been shedding retail locations for years without admitting the trajectory. Between 2020 and 2023, hundreds of comic stores across North America closed, unable to survive the combination of pandemic pressures, rising costs, and shrinking customer bases. Diamond Comic Distributors, the industry’s sole distributor for decades, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2025 after years of cutbacks and the loss of its relationships with Marvel and DC. The distribution infrastructure that moved comics from publishers to shops for forty years collapsed inside twelve months.
>The retail closures kept coming in 2025. Destiny City Comics in Tacoma, Washington closed when its rent increased beyond what the shop could sustain. Bleeding Cool tracked a single month in early 2025 where twelve stores closed across the country while seven opened — a net loss that describes an industry contracting faster than it can regenerate.>The sales picture tells the same story from a different angle. The direct market had one bright spot in 2025 and one in 2026: the DC Absolute line, led almost entirely by Absolute Batman. Industry analyst SKTCHD reported going into 2026 that Absolute Batman is “far and away the leader, with its in-store sales reaching new heights with each issue and its secondary market exploding to honestly preposterous levels,” while noting that the other Absolute titles — Wonder Woman, Superman, Martian Manhunter — were not replicating the same momentum. One book is carrying the visible health of an entire publishing line. The question SKTCHD posed for 2026 was whether the Absolute line’s new readers were discovering other comics on the shelves, and the honest answer, as of mid-2026, is that it is happening slowly.>Outside of Absolute Batman and select Energon Universe titles from Skybound, the direct market is not a growth story. Marvel’s market share fell from 39% to 29.4% in two years. DC’s recovery is real but concentrated in a handful of titles. The mid-list — the books that fill out shop orders and keep retailers from gambling everything on one or two titles per month — is thin. When a shop owner in Tacoma says rent has increased beyond what comics revenue can cover, the implicit admission is that the book portion of the business cannot carry the fixed costs that comics retail requires.
>The TFAW closure fits the pattern. The Universal CityWalk location was one of the highest-profile comic stores in the country as a publisher-owned shop in one of Los Angeles’ busiest tourist corridors. If that location cannot justify staying open, the economics of publisher-owned retail in the current market are not defensible regardless of foot traffic.>Embracer Group’s statement frames the closure as forward-looking restructuring. What it describes is a company that bought Dark Horse, fired its founder, and is now disposing of the parts of the business it does not want while rebranding everything under Fellowship Entertainment’s licensing apparatus. The stores that once funded the publisher’s existence are being treated as legacy overhead.>Mike Richardson built a comic store chain, used the profits to launch a publisher, ran that publisher for forty years, and was fired by corporate owners on its anniversary. The stores he started are closing six months later. This is the full arc of what happens when independent publishing infrastructure gets absorbed by a corporate entity that views the creative history as an asset to be monetized and the physical community infrastructure as a liability to be shed.>The direct market’s problems are structural, not cyclical. Absolute Batman is a genuine phenomenon. It cannot save every shop that cannot make rent when the rest of the rack is not moving product consistently. The TFAW closure is the most historically significant retail casualty the direct market has seen in years. The industry will not acknowledge what it means.>What does the comics retail landscape look like in five years if the current trajectory continueshttps://www.fandompulse.com/p/dark-horse-just-closed-the-comic
So Direct Market is dying but what will replace it
>>153829091Digital but that will probably be worse for the Big Two because they'll be able to better hide sales figures and fuck creators out of royalties and incentives since only the publisher will know how many people read X comic a month and they're under no obligation to be transparrent with those numbers.
>>153828871>(((embracer group)))
>>153828871>Star Wars comics during their pre-Marvel era,in 1986 the Star Wars license was held by Marvel ;^)
>>153828871The real news is that Dark Horse is still around.
>>153829091Floppies will die entirely and you'll buy what was once a 6 month run as a single book every six months on amazon
>>153829714That sounds like an improvement
The big two are owned by a conglomerate that couldn't give a rat's ass about comics, and they're barely afloat by the grace of movie studios as glorified storyboard beta testers. We're probably 1-2 big flops away from American comics pretty much not existing, save for the indies that are supposedly thriving despite nobody reading them and zero cultural presence of any kind.
>>153829714lolnofloppies will die entirely and someone else will buy reprint of the same 20 runs and GNs for the rest of print and ink publishing>>153829091why would anything replace itdo you think any IP is guaranteed an audience? I have terrible news for you re: all the IPs that just fucking disappeared even tho they were once huge
>>153829786>all the IPs that just fucking disappeared even tho they were once hugeThe lesson of the last twenty years is that this fate is preferable to continuing under the ownership of trannies and troon adjacent retards.
>>153829799I love his tactic which is always intended to hide who it's from but everyone knows who it is because he's the only person who does it.
>>153829672Not for much longer if things keep going to shit
Bump since I care about the comic Industry
>>153829714Presumably with digital chapters going online throughout the six months. Honestly I would vastly prefer that. If that is the only fallout from this it would be a positive change.
>>153829262It always does seem to be them doesn't it?
>>153828923>Absolute Batman and select Energon UniverseI know Absolute Batman is apparently doing ridiculously well but was Energon really doing that well? I never really hear anything about it on the casual side like I do Absolute Batman.
>>153829714>LCS pleading publishers to fix the issue has no effect since they no longer need to answer to that sole section of revenue anymore>Bookstores become default>Quality will not necessarily go up, but if you want a slice you have to buy the whole cakeThe keikaku will soon be doori
I was gonna make a point going over Dark Horse's situation, the circumstances where Mike Richardson got kicked out, why Dark Horse despite their history fell off the wayside compared to other publishers, etc but then I found this is another wife beater article thread so fuck that
>>153828871Cool. At this point the entire industry deserves a mercy kill.
>>153832616BasedJust make your own thread for it. Bonus, it'll push off some youtube Glitchfag spam.
>>153829091Manga and Scholastic ComicsThis isn't to start east vs west shitflinging or to bemoan muh Woke but if you keep telling various portions of your readerbase to fuck off to focus on appealing to people on blue sky and xitter who don't even read comics then it shouldn't be a surprise that the American comic book industry is fucking dying, ironically from a lack of diversity in it's offerings
>>153828871There is no way those stores were profitable.
Digital is the future. That doesn't mean that print doesn't work, manga does print well. But you need to expand it with anime and games.
>fandom pulseReminder this is a garbage culture war content farm blog that tries to pass itself off as comics journalism. The author probably pilfered all those bits from other articles and twitter comments before running it through chatgpt.
>>153833434Will scholastic or some other company ever do more than kids comics though
>>153829768>nobody reading them and zero cultural presence of any kind.Game over/co/cksuckerThis is the /a/sian century
>>153833971You can tell by the increase in the presence of trannies.
>>153829768>nobody reading them and zero cultural presence of any kind.KekLmaoGame over/co/cksuckerJ/a/pan wonThis is the /a/sian century
>>153833979
>>153833991Yep, the cross pollination of anime fungus into Western culture has been very damaging, no question about it. The sort of people who do that sort of thing watch a lot of dragon balls and naruto or whatever it is now.
Yeah no shit. Gas is five bucks a gallon (and I'm in a cheap state). It doesn't matter what's in them or who they're by, comics are a luxury I can't afford anymore.
>>153833986Why isn't Superman popular outside the anglosphere?
>>153833991I wonder what kind of autism it takes to make this?I like trannies. But this is dumb. It reads like black exploitation films. What if that was a black woman saying "Im a black woman in Gotham, of course I have a weapon" and its a bat with the N word on it or the black power symbol?Its just kind of silly.
>>153834045He appeals to a sense of justice and goodness that doesn't really exist in the third world. "He's stronger and faster, why doesn't he just rob them and rape people?"
I suspect marvel and dc make more money now then they did in 1990.
>>153834136>What if that was a black woman saying "Im a black woman in Gotham, of course I have a weaponIt would be made by the exact same people trying to force an unpopular political movement that doesn't actually exist, and they would see nothing wrong with it. Its not like blackploitation at all because its not tongue in cheek, its not self aware, and its not fun.
>>153834204Yes, that's why they're closing stores instead of keeping them open.
>>153829730This will kill comics, they need a way back into retail or is over
>>153835050They can just make money and ignore the hard part that is printing and distributing, but I suspect they will just leave the online distribution to disney and will become an evil conglomerate
>>153835050Comic stores can't sell books with a 50 cent margin with 2026 hyper inflation designed to destroy the country going on. That isn't the industries fault.
>>153835209They had all the chances in the world to make political comic books and tell people the inflation could be avoided by not voting for warmongering republicans
>>153835247>warmongering republicansjews
>>153835330The party of affiliation of the presidential candidate is and will be republican, they will not be practicing jews they will just pick a non jew to lead the republican partyEvery time, so you vote for a warmongering republican
>>153835247people wouldn't buy those
the only path to a sustainable future: floppies are dying. the format is obsolete. its like trying to find ways to save VHS or cassette tapesDC's strategy is the best for covering the spread and trying to survive:at best, you run smaller sub imprints a la Absolute, Energon. 4 to 6 books max with an occasional side mini or two. For big universes like DC and Marvel you *may* be able to survive by bundling everything into smaller imprints/families with a "showrunner" like a "street level" imprint, a "horror" imprint (but not like Marvel's Midnight)focus as much as you can on bookstore/online retail OGNs for different age groups - like what DC is doing. Print the chapters as floppies first if you need to offset expensesDC is also bundling floppies into packs and selling them at Dollar Tree. And now they're doing magazine sized reprint collections showing first chapters of famous trades with ads showing where you can pick up the rest of the story, and selling them at CVS and Walgreens
>>153835875Vinyls came back thanks to hipsters.
>>153829187Whatever the case may be, any digital platform the western comic industry comes up with will somehow manage to be greedier, less convenient and less user-friendly than most online manga stores, which is saying something when the comparison is K-Manga and Manga Up.
>>153830382But they have evergreen manga titles like Berserk, surely they can endure as a manga publisher
>>153835584According to whom?Am still trying to buy the blue bettle special from where this page comes from but I live in south america, they obviously wanna talk about politics they clearly want to see their chud opinions reflected on the comics they bought DC pride and read the boysThey still call watchmen the greatest cape comic ever because Moore was politically relentless
>>153836028This
>>153834007Those people all hate CHADnime and CHADnga because it sexualizes women. Also the western culture literally invented trannies.
>>153833834scholastic is aware of their strengths. no point in courting potential controversy when they are already printing money
>>153833434There's plenty of genre diversity with Image, Dark Horse, and other smaller publishers. Viewpoint diversity, yeah, forget it.
>>153835875Cvs and wallgreens arent the answer lmao. Those closed in my town . And so did a dollar tree. The comic shops are doing great though. These shops are closing because embracer wants out of the retailer business. John Del Arroz is just telling chuds what they want to hear.
>>153835875Just follow what manga has been doing. Compile the floppy releases into multi volume releases and sell them like that.
>>153839773>Dude just do what manga does lmaoYou know the reason why manga can do that here is because we're not the ones supporting the serialization of the actual fiction right?Tankobons chapters for popular series' aren't made straight to volumeThey're serialized individually across magazinesAnd if you're already talking about volume releases in general, comics already have that
>>153834169Also treating them as inhuman robots or something similar in the east cause they can’t be that good of a person!
>>153838427Where in gods name do you live that a comic book shop is okay but a Dollar Tree isn’t? Stop lying on the internet
>>153839898There are plenty of good nature human heroes in the east, wtf are you talking about?
>>153839848Even comparing comics with themselves for the price of 3 of floppies I could buy a Watchmen/All star superman volume(the small prints). Buying a volume always feels like a more worthwhile acquisition.
>>153828871>Pegasus Fantasy Books>in 1980fun coincidence
>>153833434So you're bemoaninig muh woke.
>>153840548>So you're bemoaninig muh woke.Dude, scholastic publishes a lot of "woke" stuffOne of their newest successful books is literally about a Romanian girl immigrating to the USA, experiencing her first period, and it ends with the reveal that her new best friend has a lesbian crush for her
>>153837831>There's plenty of genre diversity with Image, Dark Horse, and other smaller publishers.Ehh, not really.I can't think of any relevant romance titles from any of the comic publishers outside of maybe Lore Olympus.I think, I've never read it, but I'm told it's a romance comic.
>>153840573>relevantIf popularity is your only metric, you're kind of deliberately choosing to be close mindedThat said, yeah romance is a niche genre in a niche industryThere's Love Everlasting which lasted from 2022 to 2024 Saga's romance (at least the first half) but it's also many other things
>>153833986>>153833971Except that the isekai subgenre is spreading faster than the clap
>>153840648There are barely any isekai titles in the comic shops that I usually visit and in terms of the genre itself, I've checked the magazines that publish isekai manga and they haven't increased the number of them that get made.>>153840571>bout a Romanian girl immigrating to the USA, experiencing her first period, What's the name of that one again?
>>153840689The New GirlIt got a sequel this monthI'd storytime but>272 pages
>>153840631>yeah romance is a niche genreIn comics maybe.Not in other industries.
>>153840741Has anyone storytimed the first one?
>>153840741>I'd story time it Ew
>>153835875Yo I’ve also seen those Superman magazines at my grocery store, they put like 3 issues from Joshua Willamsons run for like $12 bucks
>>153840571I genuinely don't think people include balkan fags in their woke definition. It's mostly about other louder minorities.
>>153840573Women prefer to read romance without the pictures, it's not coming back.
>>153840571>Dude, scholastic publishes a lot of "woke" stuffI never said they didn't.
>>153832616Please do
