Politics & Power Quote by Rob Walton

Walton’s jab lands because it’s a locker-room truth delivered into a retail ecosystem that often runs on passion masquerading as strategy. By framing comic shop owners as “not business people,” he’s not merely insulting them; he’s diagnosing a cultural habit in fandom markets: gatekeeping tastes while neglecting the fundamentals that keep the lights on. The repetition of “They don’t understand…” is doing heavy rhetorical work here. It’s a piling-on cadence that mimics frustration with an industry that, in his view, confuses curating with selling.

The phrase “good product” is the tell. Walton isn’t arguing about art so much as about what moves units. “Good” becomes shorthand for commercially viable, accessible, and merchandisable, not necessarily formally inventive or creator-forward. That subtext matters because comic shops have historically been semi-clubhouses: owner as tastemaker, regulars as community, newcomers as suspects. Walton’s critique implies that insularity isn’t just a vibe problem; it’s a revenue problem.

Contextually, the tension echoes decades of churn in North American comics retail: boom-and-bust cycles, distributor bottlenecks, and a customer base that aged in place while bookstores, libraries, and later digital platforms captured casual readers. Coming from an athlete, it reads less like theory and more like blunt performance analysis: you can love the game, but if you can’t sell tickets, you’re not running a franchise. The intent is corrective, but the sting is calculated to force a reckoning.