Who we are
ComicMix went public in 2007, when Mike Gold, Glenn Hauman and Brian Alvey decided comics needed a place online that took comics seriously (mostly) and didn’t take itself seriously at all. We started publishing new comics online immediately such as GrimJack, Jon Sable Freelance, Demons of Sherwood, and we’ve been covering the industry ever since.
Along the way we became a publisher and a packager. We’ve produced books for other publishers, published our own, and put out Mine!, the anthology benefiting Planned Parenthood that won the 2018 Ringo Award for Best Anthology and picked up an Eisner nomination. We’ve worked with Dennis O’Neil, John Ostrander, Martin Pasko, Paul Kupperberg, and a lot of people who were just getting started when they came through our door.
Heck, our books even made it to Jeopardy!
The whole time, the job has been the same: help great comics get made, and help them get to readers.
We are here to support comic retailers, comics creators and the comics buying public.
Why we built a Market
In January 2025, Diamond Comic Distributors went into bankruptcy. For about four decades Diamond had been the pipeline for the direct market. Suddenly shops that had dealt with one distributor were juggling several, each with its own minimums, terms and paperwork. And Diamond’s comic shop locator— the way a lot of readers found a shop in the first place— went into limbo along with everything else.
Meanwhile, the online money kept going where it’s gone for twenty years. Amazon pays its affiliates 4.5% on a book. The comic shop that got you reading in the first place gets nothing.
So we built infrastructure:
- A store with a deep catalog of graphic novels, manga and books, shipped direct to readers from Ingram’s warehouses and from independent vendors
- A directory of comic shops that we check by hand, one shop at a time
- An affiliate program that pays shops, creators, reviewers, podcasters, schools, clubs— anyone who sends readers our way— and puts money into the shop pool every time they do
Our mission is to spread the joy of comics and help comic shops thrive.
ComicMix Market is an online store for graphic novels, manga, collected editions and books about comics, built so that buying online pays a real comic shop. Choose your shop and it earns up to 30% of what you spend. Don’t choose one, and your purchase still pays into a pool that’s split among every participating shop.
Either way, the shop doesn’t have to stock it, ship it, or answer the email about where it is. We do that part.
How it works
- Choose your sor your shop. If they’ve got it on the shelf, buy it there.
- Comics are better together.
* And of course, this ain’t a library, kid. That said, if you wanna try your library to get comics, please do. Here’s a link.
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FAQ
- Is ComicMix Market a comic shop? No. We’re an online store. There’s no counter, no back-issue bins, no Wednesday crowd. We send money and customers to the shops that have those things.
- Doesn’t an online comics store compete with my local shop? It’s the first thing every retailer asks, and fair enough. We built the Market to redirect money that’s already going online— mostly to Amazon— back to comic shops. Every order placed through a shop’s link pays that shop. Every order placed without one pays into the pool. The shop doesn’t lose a sale it would have made anyway, and it gets paid for sales it was never going to see.
- Who runs ComicMix Market? ComicMix LLC, the same company behind ComicMix.com, our publishing imprint, and ComicMix Pro Services.
- Where do the books come from? Most ship direct from our distributors straight from their warehouses to you. Some come from independent publishers and vendors who sell through the Market.
- Do you ship outside the United States? Not yet. We ship to US addresses only. Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands aren’t shop. Find it on our Shop Directory and click Support This Shop.
- Shop the Market. Same prices whether you pick a shop or not.
- Your shop gets paid. Up to 30% of your purchase goes to the shop you chose. No shop chosen? It goes to the pool, which we split among participating shops twice a year.
What this isn’t*
It isn’t charity, and we don’t pitch it to shops that way. Comic shops are businesses. This gives them a way to sell online with no inventory, no shipping and no new software— and a way to get paid when their customers buy somewhere other than the counter.
It also isn’t a replacement fupported at launch. [CONFIRM: APO/FPO]
Do you sell single issues? Not yet. Our catalog is books— graphic novels, collected editions, manga, art books, prose about comics. For this week’s single issues, your local shop is still the place.
How do I contact you? [CONFIRM: support email] We aim to answer within one business day.