HONESDALE, PA — As the T-shirt saying reads, “Always be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Then always be Batman.”

Customers at Letterhead Comics in Honesdale may not always be Batman, but they do have one thing in common, says 25-year-old owner Aaron Vietri: they’re all interested in a good story. Vietri has been welcoming graphic novel lovers and those completely new—and sometimes apathetic—to the medium for five years in Honesdale, after moving his store from Carbondale. At the end of the month, Vietri will be closing up shop, moving with his wife, who is a physician in the Air Force, to her next station in Ohio.

Unlike small businesses in the city, Vietri said, he’s become used to a customer base that extends in a 35-mile radius in each direction. And it’s not all in the interest of hawking comics. For him, there was a lure in the small town and its people. Part of retail in rural America is just being there and listening. “A lot of people have nobody in their lives who share this passion [for comics,]” said Vietri. “I love comics and I love people,” he said. “It’s the relationship with my customers.”

It’s also the comics, of course. Vietri started reading as a kid with the ‘80s-era series “Micronauts” and never lost that lo

ve. Rather than go to college, he started a comics store. At age 18, he said, “I did want to add to the conversation.”

Comics as a hobby are typically depicted only in mainstream media as the fodder of misfits. But those who have visited Vietri’s store and chatted with him over the years learned that the medium spans most genres, from sci-fi to horror to historical or nonfiction adaptations, which always becomes more interesting when paired with a creative take on how certain events might’ve looked in vivid color. Though DC and Marvel have long monopolized the genre, books such as the widely popular “Persepolis,” a memoir about growing up in Iran during the revolution, tend to reach new audiences.

Avid comic readers are largely drawn to the finely detailed characters and plots in modern comics writing. (Hat tip to the late, great Stan Lee here, who The Economist’s obituary notes was largely responsible for the change.)

Letterhead, and other small comic stores, don’t just sell the books. They fill a social need. And the books themselves show that misfits─and we are all misfits to some degree─can save the world. Or at least save themselves.

Take Superman. “A virtuous character in the hands of a competent writer is very powerful,” said Vietri of his favorite character. Virtue doesn’t need to be boring. Superman is complex and troubled in his own way—growing up non-human in a small town couldn’t have been easy. One of Vietri’s favorite mini-series is Red Son, which envisions Superman raised in the Soviet Union, on a Ukrainian collective farm. “It plays with ideas of nature vs. nurture,” he said.

“A virtuous character in the hands of a competent writer is very powerful."

Non-comics-readers might equate the books with kids, but Vietri doesn’t even have a special kids’ section. He’d rather talk to the children, or better yet, encourage parents to talk to them. “What will they enjoy? What will challenge them? What warms my heart is when parents cultivate their child’s interest and balance their role as a parent,” he said. “I love being a part of that.”

Vietri acknowledges that he could leave a manager in charge of the store, but oversight would have been difficult, he said, especially if the family is transferred even farther away.

And you get the sense that absentee ownership would mean losing something valuable. “Caring about the customers was really nice,” he said, behind his desk at the store on a Tuesday. “And you hope to do something positive, to put something positive out into the world.”

Comic Books by the Numbers

The days of ten-cent copies of cheap-paper comics are long gone. The books are glossy, gorgeous and several dollars more. Graphic novels are longer and more like a traditional book. Comichron.com and ICV2 report $1.015 billion in total comics sales for 2017, down 6.5 percent from 2016 due to slowing print sales and fewer comics released; digital is strong, though.

And then there are movies.  Per IMDB, five of the top-ten grossing films of 2018 were based on comic books. (Six if you count Incredibles 2.) That includes the #1, Black Panther, which pulled in over $700 million.

Take Comic Con, comics-related conventions popping up in cities major and minor. Cons tend to count attendance differently, notes the site ontechnologyandmedia, which makes comparisons tough, but Publisher’s Weekly reports ticket sales hit a record $250,000 for just the New York Comic Con.