It’s an odd time in comics.

While sales performance has been exemplary, with stratospheric revenue in 2021 and much of that success carrying into 2022 and even 2023 to some degree, there have been strange skies in the direct market of late. Whether that’s publishers falling apart or retailers struggling to feel the joy of success when industry practices are bringing them down, it’s been difficult to reconcile industry-wide reports with some of individual stories.

It isn’t just the macro side of things that has felt off. The micro — you know, the actual experience of being a single-issue customer at comic shops — has had weird vibes as well, at least from my point of view. I’ve shared before that my own energy and enthusiasm about Wednesdays has waned, with theoretical trade waiting 7 taking the lead over the endless deluge of single-issue titles. With the constant relaunches, the rise of finite series, and the focus often squarely on variant covers, it has become difficult to diagnose what matters to me as a reader when the publishers themselves telegraph that very little of it does.

The problem is I’m not really a “typical” reader anymore, so my perspective might not reflect how others feel. Because of SKTCHD and Off Panel, my view is colored by those experiences and the fact that I’m constantly immersed in the world of comics. While I’ve heard from the occasional reader who has felt the same way, it did make me wonder: Are other single issue comic fans changing their habits like I am?

They have been according to retailers I’ve talked, as some have noticed shifts of late. But that’s still more macro than micro. To get real insight into how readers are thinking, I figured I’d need to talk to regular Wednesday single-issue comic fans to see how they’re feeling, and whether the malaise I’ve experienced is universal or isolated.

So, I did that.

I recently had the chance to quiz a collection of readers who are typically Wednesday customers for single-issue comics 8 about whether their own habits have shifted in the past six months to a year and, if so, why they think that’s been happening. Now, it’s worth noting from the top that this is not a survey, and it does not involve a representative number of comic shop customers. I am not a market researcher, so this is not that. This was just a random sampling from around the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland talking about their experiences.

It was still an interesting exercise, though, and one I found illuminating. It quickly became clear that everyone does things their own way and has their reasons for doing so. But there were some themes within the answers, and ones I found instructive about the wider marketplace and why running a comic shop might be such an unpredictable experience.