A trend I didn't see coming, except I absolutely did. Local comic shops across the country are reporting a hike in demand, and the timing lines up almost perfectly with Spider-Man: Brand New Day doing its best box office impression of a runaway freight train.

We've known forever that a big movie lifts the source material. I remember the comic aisles feeling busier in the months after past hits like The Dark Knight and Black Panther, though I'd point you to the shops themselves for actual sales history rather than my memory. What the current report confirms is simpler and, I'd argue, better: the Spider-Man effect is real and it's happening now. When a movie becomes the kind of cultural event everyone's talking about, some slice of the audience walks out of the theater wondering what else is out there, and apparently a lot of them are finding the answer at their local comic shop instead of just scrolling a streaming app.

What I hope, and what store owners have seen in past movie bumps, is that a chunk of this surge is new faces. A customer who asks "where do I start" is a customer who comes back. Anyone can sell a Spider-Man #1 reprint to a curious moviegoer once. The shops that hand that person a good entry point, a recommended run, a real conversation, those are the ones who turn a movie bump into a regular Wednesday customer. And if you know anything about comic store culture, Wednesday is the whole ballgame.

What makes this moment feel promising is that Brand New Day has been drawing on storylines longtime readers know well. Whether that translates into people asking about specific arcs and creators at the register, I can't say from the report, but it's not hard to picture someone leaving the theater and wanting to know where those stories came from. That's a deeper kind of demand than a poster tie-in ever generates.

I've spent this entire year learning not to bet against these movies, and I'm not starting now. But this is the part of the story I genuinely love. The box office numbers are fun to track, sure, and the records are records. Then there's the part where a kid might walk out of a multiplex and into a comic shop for the first time. That part actually keeps this whole ecosystem alive.

So if you're one of those new faces: welcome. Ask the person behind the counter where to start. They've been waiting for you all year. And if you're a longtime reader watching newcomers flood your shop, be kind. Everybody's first issue is somebody else's five-thousandth.