The Comic Shop Locator Is Broken. Here's What We Did About It.

In 1996, Diamond Comic Distributors launched a toll-free service with a simple purpose: help people find their local comic book store.

It worked for almost thirty years.

Then, in 2025, Diamond filed for bankruptcy. The company that had distributed English-language comics to thousands of retailers since 1982 began winding down, selling off assets, and stepping back from the infrastructure it had built. One of the casualties was comicshoplocator.com — a site that had served millions of searches from fans trying to find a shop near them.

Today, that site has an SSL error. Nobody's fixing it.

That's the problem we decided to solve.

Your Local Shop Is Still Out There

Here's the thing about Diamond's collapse: it disrupted distributors and publishers and retailers. But it didn't close the shops themselves.

Across the country, thousands of local comic book stores are still open. Still running New Comic Book Day. Still staffed by people who know every title on the rack and can point you toward exactly what you didn't know you needed. Still hosting game nights, signings, and the kind of community you can't find on a streaming platform.

They're just harder to find right now. The infrastructure that connected readers to stores went down with Diamond, and no one stepped up quickly enough to replace it.

We did.

What Local Comic Shop Is

Local Comic Shop is a free, community-powered comic shop locator built to fill the gap Diamond left behind.

You can search for stores by city, browse by specialty — comics, manga, back issues, TTRPGs, collectibles, graded books, events, and more — and read ratings from real fans on what each shop does best. No subscription. No Diamond account required. No gatekeeping.

If you run a local comic book store, you can submit your listing for free. We want every shop in the country represented here, from the massive multi-location retailers to the single-room shops with the best back issue bins you've ever dug through.

This is the comic shop locator the direct market needs now.

Why This Matters

Local comic shops are the backbone of the direct market. They're the places where readers become collectors, where kids discover the medium for the first time, where fandoms form around a shared table. Publishers need them. Readers need them.

And they need to be findable.

When someone searches for "comic shops near me" or "comic book store in [their city]" and lands on a broken page, that's a missed connection — for the reader who walks away empty-handed, and for the shop that never knew the reader existed.

Every search that ends without a result is a reader who might not try again.

We built Local Comic Shop because that's a problem worth solving. Not for a distributor's bottom line. For the community.

Where We're Headed

We launched with shops in the Atlanta metro area and we're expanding. If your city isn't covered yet, it will be. And if you know a shop that should be listed, you can submit it directly — that's how this grows.

We're also building out features that matter to real fans: event listings, specialty filters, store hours, and community reviews that go deeper than a star rating. The goal is to build the most useful, most accurate, and most complete comic shop locator in the country.

One search at a time.

Find Your Shop

Whether you're a longtime reader looking for a new local spot, or someone who just finished Saga and wants to know where to get the next volume in person — you're in the right place.

Local Comic Shop is free to use and free to list. We are not affiliated with Diamond Comic Distributors or any former operator of comicshoplocator.com.