"put them back in" means that they are not currently "in".
Speciality shops have been the death of comics.
In any given city, hundreds if not thousands of news stands and convenience stores used to sell random, and regular samplings of comics in the 80s and earlier.
Now it's one or two shops, a dozen maybe somewhere very large, in every city catering to a few thousand customers with massive constant requirements.
You have to want to buy comics, and be willing to catch a couple connecting buses, before you can buy comics, which is shit if you are 8.
They is no function where you can accidentally run into comics.
It's sad.
Maybe so (and that's a very big
maybe) but supermarkets, news stands and convenience stores didn't or weren't of any help in doing this if they still wanted to do this, and for for whatever reasons,
many of them stopped doing it.
Most convenience stores are themselves small independent businesses like the comic book stores, and they usually don't bother to sell comic books these days (and when they do, it's a desultory selection and usually only stuff like
Archie, which not all kids (or adults) want to read. Big chains like Mac's (a Canadian chain) & 7-11 (an international chain) plus any chains in any other nation still sell them, as I've said, but kids don't usually go there to buy them anyway, and parents don't bother to look there or sent their kids to either place. Newsstand shop chains here in Toronto where I live like UCS (United Cigar Stores of Canada, in particular it's retail division called The Great Canadian Magazine Co.) and
International News also still sell comic books, but most people don't take their kids to these places or places like these in other countries, to buy comic books; they go to bookstores or the comic book shops. And the reason they do that is because the comic book stores (plus their online cousins) offer targeted service like the older small independent book stores of the past that are now dead due to the chains taking over. They offer service, selection, and they can order something (and offer you a
pullbox for said order(s). Compared to that, what does a typical newsstand/convenience store/supermarket have to offer? Not a lot, plus they can't get you back issues either (although you usually can get TPB collections of most titles nowadays.)
One other thing to mention related to this; skewing to younger people doesn't always mean big profits, as the manga industry has found to it's sad regret: most younger people who read manga don't have a lot of money to spend on it (or are unwilling to spend the money on manga) mostly because of the prices of manga and also because of the
scanlation/Bittorrent wave now going on (it can best be explained in this article:
Why Manga Publishing Is Dying (And How It Could Get Better)), but one part of this article states why comic books are better off sold in comic book shops and why youth don't seen to be targeted (as well as why they're not printed on cheap paper in black & white like you want the
Star Wars book to be):
Manga is hurting the way that all print media is hurting — but in some ways it's worse, because manga is ill-equipped to adapt to New Media. Like American comic books, manga started out as cheap entertainment for kids, but while American comics faced their dwindling readership by turning into an adult collector's item with color, thicker paper and higher production values, manga magazines (and to a lesser extent, graphic novel collections) still use cheap ink and cheap paper to cram in as much pages-per-yen value possible.
This makes them an anachronism in an era where newspapers, phone books and pretty much any disposable printed media seem inconvenient at best, and environmentally irresponsible at worst. No matter how cheap you make it, you can't get people excited about grimy newsprint anymore: in 2007 the Japanese company Digima founded the first free weekly manga magazine, Comic Gumbo, which they hoped would be funded by advertising, product placement and graphic novel sales. But like free weekly newspapers everywhere, they discovered it was hard even getting readers to pick them up, and both company and magazine went out of business after 48 issues.
Bottom line, (as I've probably said before),
parents and kids have to work hard to look for (and WANT) to buy comic books and read them; if they don't, they won't find them. It's easier now due to online retailers and certain comic book shops that cater to kids like the local example in my residence of Toronto, but one still has to do some homework to find what one wants to read, be they child
or adult.
