The TV is always on at the comic book store on Chapel Street, and although the channel will soon be changed to ESPN, at the moment everybody is watching the Food Network. Giada de Laurentiis is making pasta—a word which by now is surely fully English, though she insists on pronouncing it with an Italian accent—leaning deeply over the saucepot every few seconds, her full chest in a very low-cut sweater. Joe Stinson, managing the store, watches the coy chef and sighs, “That’s what keeps the show on the air.” Above Joe, a six-inch Princess Leia doll is wearing the skimpy metal bikini from Jabba the Hutt’s pleasure palace, doing her busty best to keep Joe’s show on the air as well.

New Haven has had just one comic book shop for at least 20 years, and Joe’s been working there for most of that time. The store was originally on Elm Street, though back then it was called Whirligig. In the early ’90s the shop was renamed The Dream Factory, and then changed again to Moon Dogs, which moved to Chapel Street when—after a failed attempt to expand nationwide—it promptly went out of business. Joe and a partner bought what was left of Moon Dogs around 1996 and opened Alternate Universe, which they’ve been running together for the past 14 years.

The store has been successful enough that in 2005 they opened a second location in Milford, and yet comics remain such a niche product that you only know about Alternate Universe if you are already a fan. Tiffany has been working at the Dunkin’ Donuts right next to the comic book store for some time now, but still doesn’t know that Joe’s store exists. Yale students walk past Alternate Universe every weekend on their way to Gag Jr.’s Liquor Shop, on the other side of the store. “People who buy comic books don’t drink,” says the owner of Gag Jr.’s. “If you want to get drunk, you come to me. If you want to get drunk on comic books, you go to Joe’s.” There’s a wrinkled, short man in the corner of the liquor shop, with his head down on the counter—very much drunk and very much without a comic book—proving Gag Jr. right.

Inside Alternate Universe a young French man is busy claiming that France doesn’t have comic books, and that only America has great soo-pare-eeroes like Spiderman and Batman. Joe is helping another customer find the right size plastic sheath for his Magic: The Gathering playing cards, a big seller for the store: “No, those covers are too wide, you can’t shuffle your cards with them.” Though Joe ends up finding the right card cases for the customer, he also points customers to other comic book stores (the nearest is 20 to 30 minutes away) if he doesn’t have what they’re looking for.

One guy in a suit asks: “Do you have any of the early X-Men, maybe in the low one hundreds?” Joe doesn’t need to look anything up in his computer inventory to answer that if the guy is looking for issue #101 he doesn’t have it: “That’s the first one with Phoenix.”

But even if he doesn’t have X-Men #101, Joe does have an amazingly comprehensive collection. “I don’t buy comics anymore,” he says, “I own every one I ever wanted to.” He’s got a whole shelf devoted to the Green Lantern, two devoted to Superman, and another two to Batman. His favorites are Arkham Asylum, The Killing Joke, and The Dark Knight Returns, but notes that “occasionally Year One is the second best,” as though he often rereads and precisely reorders his favorites.

There are shelves of alternative “comix”: the magical-realist Palomar, the philosophical Madman, the creepy Lenore. There’s a large section of comics that hopefully aren’t serious (Barack the Barbarian and Condoleeza Rice: The Comic Biography), and stacks of graphic novels that are very serious indeed: the war journalism of Joe Sacco, the MoMA-displayed Jimmy Corrigan, the Pulitzer Prize winning MAUS. And, of course, there’s a corner of the shop devoted to pornographic comics: Shh!, Fetish Fantasies, Footlicker, and the Manga Sutra, placed in front of—and blocking—the title of one comic with a bright yellow cover depicting a young girl biting her knuckles as she sits on the toilet.

It takes three people—Joe, his business partner, and a manager who looks uncannily and unfairly like the comic shop owner from the Simpsons—to man the store, order new issues, and help sponsor the Connecticut comic book convention, ComiCONN, taking place in North Haven this May.

Despite so many print magazines and newspapers going online, Joe’s business is doing very well. And yet, the comic book industry itself may be struggling. Practically every other page is an advertisement in one of the most recent serials, Joe the Barbarian, and the genre-defining publication Comics Journal has shut down their print operation, after 300 issues, to go web-only for issue #301.

“But it’s different for a magazine,” says Joe, “People who buy comics like to hold things; they’re very tactile, they like to see things first. The only way comic books will die out is if print media in general dies out.” And if all publishing and retail goes under, he worries, “we’ll be stuck in a world with nothing but restaurants and banks. And groceries.” Then Joe, the comic book lover, falls silent for a few moments—while the pundits on ESPN loudly discuss Tiger Woods—and imagines that terrible and empty alternate universe.