Art & Creativity Quote by Jim Woodring

There is a quiet indictment tucked into Woodring's matter-of-fact phrasing: “have to rely” frames comic shops not as a vibrant choice but as a bottleneck. He’s describing an ecosystem where the “alternative” label isn’t just aesthetic; it’s logistical. If you’re not built for mass distribution, you inherit a distribution problem, and the industry’s default pipeline becomes your de facto gatekeeper.

The line lands because it names an unglamorous truth about independent art: the struggle isn’t only making strange, personal work; it’s getting that work to appear in the same physical world as everyone else’s attention. “Comic book stores” function here as both refuge and constraint. They’re one of the few places willing to stock odd, idiosyncratic material, but they also narrow the audience to people already fluent in comics retail culture. That’s a subtle kind of segregation: alternative cartooning becomes something you discover only if you already know where to look, reinforcing the idea that it’s niche by nature rather than by infrastructure.

Woodring, whose own work thrives on the uncanny and the handmade, is also pointing to how format shapes reception. The store shelf places experimental cartooning beside superhero monthlies, manga, merch, and collector habits, which can turn a fragile, literary object into just another commodity competing for rack space. The subtext is less nostalgia for a purer past than frustration with how distribution dictates what counts as “mainstream.” If the only reliable bridge to readers is a specialty shop, the culture has effectively outsourced artistic discovery to a single, shrinking corridor.