About ComicsPRO

Origin story

ComicsPRO was founded in 2004 by a group of established retailers, including Joe Field of Flying Colors Comics in Concord, California, and Amanda Fisher of Muse Comics in Missoula, Montana, who became the organization’s founding leaders. As stated in the organization’s original incorporation paperwork, its purpose was “to promote the progress and development of comic book retailers, help them build better marketing and daily business practices, and improve the industry by educating the public about comic books.” In recent years, that mission has taken concrete form in initiatives like the COMET Metadata Standard, an industry effort to improve how comics data is organized and shared across the direct market, and the revamping of Local Comic Shop Day to celebrate how comic shops serve as community hubs.

The organization’s annual meeting has become the centerpiece of its work and a genuine highlight for the wider industry. Comics Beat’s coverage of the 2025 and 2026 meetings in Glendale, California described retailers and publishers gathering with an optimistic, solution-oriented mood even amid industry turbulence, and by 2026 the event had grown from roughly two and a half days into a full four-day gathering of seminars, meetups, and events. Creators who’ve attended echo that enthusiasm: Gerry Duggan described the 2025 meeting as providing a place for “creators, editors and senior leadership from nearly every comic company [to hang] out in LA this week, and some folks that have worked together for years are only meeting in person for the first time.” As media mergers, global disruptions, and distribution debacles have marked frequent highs and lows in the last two decades of comics retail, ComicsPRO has weathered the storms and grown into an institution that serves as a point of calm in the chaos.