So where do you go in San Francisco in 2025 to actually buy this stuff?

Nowhere, really.

The question came up recently among local collectors, and the answer is depressingly predictable. As one SF resident put it: "None of the shops in the city specialize in that, unfortunately. Back issues are too volatile for a place with rent as expensive as it is here."

Let that sink in. The city that created underground comix has priced out the shops that would sell them. It's not that demand doesn't exist — collectors are actively looking. It's that no small business owner in their right mind is going to pay San Francisco commercial rent to stock niche inventory with unpredictable margins. The math simply doesn't work.

This is a pattern we've seen over and over. The bookstores, the record shops, the weird little galleries — the cultural infrastructure that made San Francisco San Francisco — they don't survive in a city where regulatory costs and real estate prices punish exactly the kind of scrappy, low-margin businesses that give neighborhoods their soul.

Nobody's asking for a government subsidy for comic book shops. That's not the point. The point is that decades of policy choices — restrictive zoning, byzantine permitting, tax burdens that favor large chains over independents — have created an environment where cultural institutions can't organically exist anymore.

You can still find Last Gasp, the legendary underground publisher, sending out newsletters and doing online sales. But the storefronts? The places where you could walk in, flip through a bin, and stumble on something weird and wonderful? Gone.

San Francisco loves to celebrate its counterculture heritage. It just won't let anyone afford to keep it alive.