Tony Grove hasn’t experienced sales this good on a Wednesday — new issue day — in months, odd considering the popularity of films based upon comic books.

“It’s a great time to be a comic fan and a movie fan,” says Grove, 46, owner of Tony’s Kingdom of Comics in Keizer.

But despite these great times, Grove and other local shop owners haven’t felt a ripple anywhere close to Hollywood’s wave of financial success.

Comic book culture is almost inescapable of late, with iconic characters plastered on T-shirts, dominating toy shelves and most noticeably, filling movie theaters.

According to dailyfinance.com’s article, industry estimates showed a one percent increase totaling $324.66 million between the months of January and September of this year.

An amazing feat (and coincidental — the golden age of comics was born during the Great Depression), considering the country’s current financial problems. On the ground level, however, talk of a boom lands with a thud.

Nicholas Coffey counters the hype by factoring in all the shops that sell comics around the world; in that grand landscape, a one percent increase in sales is “not a lot to go around.”

Coffey, owner of Salem’s comic shop, Danger Zone — a store more than 30 years old that he has been a part of since 1999 — like Grove, hasn’t seen any increase in sales.

Coffey said it pales in comparison to 20 years ago in the early 1990s. People were buying mass amounts of comics — ranging anywhere from seven copies to whole boxes full of the same title, hoarding them away in hopes of being able to sell them for a higher price in the future.

The surge in buying inflated prices rapidly — titles with an original retail price of $2.50 jumped to $40 within days. Now, however, most of those books aren't even worth the cover price. The comic book companies had overprinted, making titles virtually worthless.

And consequently, said Grove, they almost killed the industry.

Marvel Comics, one of the two giants in the industry, certainly felt the results of publishing merely for profit. By the mid-90s they faced bankruptcy, a fact which is hard to believe considering their current string of success, most notably in motion pictures.

Comic book material is being adapted for the big screen at a Flash-like pace with more likely to come if Marvel's recent acquisition by Disney is any indication.

Grove's shop may be relatively young in comparison to Danger Zone — 3 years old this December — yet Grove has been captivated by the story telling and art of comic books since the age of 5.

“Hollywood’s run out of good ideas,” Grove said, so they’re turning to comic books. The film industry saves a step in doing so because the comic doubles as a storyboard for the movie.

Michael Versoza, 27, a comic book fan since he was 8 years old, also has theories as to why comics are being adapted to the silver screen: it’s an untapped and a nowhere-near-exhausted resource, begging to be transferred to film.

For the first time, Versoza says, the creativity and the ability — financially and cinematically — is there to be harnessed.

Whether such adaptations fuel interest in comic books more broadly is up for debate.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic “The Watchmen,” a 12 part limited series published in 1986-1987 and adapted into a motion picture in the spring of 2009, from a critical standpoint, was not necessarily a great film.

Interest in the film drew people back to the graphic novel, some for the first time, and “made it a best seller all over again," said Grove.

The original sources may sell well again, especially the ones based upon independent titles, but there's not much in the way of traceable lasting effects.

“[The movies] bring in new people, but they usually get that book and they’re done," said Coffey.

At least until another movie piques their interest.

Neither Grove nor Coffey have seen a boom in business, but that’s not to say that comics don’t have trends of their own.

Zombies and “resurrected” heroes are huge right now, the latter currently occupying DC Comics’ “Blackest Night”—a limited series spanning many titles, with the Green Lantern comics being of the most interest to fans.

On the independent level, rehash titles such as “Dracula” and “Predator” and titles based off television shows, such as “Angel” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” are doing well.

Comic books may deal with a vast array of themes, spanning the range of super heroes to horror genres to stories grounded in reality, but they all have one unifying quality: they combine the art of story-telling with images, uniquely creating a world of escape.

The “escapism,” said Versoza, is why fans keep coming back regardless of how cool comics are to the public at the time or how prominent they are in pop-culture.

“People still want a fantasy world," Coffey agreed.

Grove said that interest will likely keep comics around long past the era of most print media.

“At first I was very concerned and worried,” said Grove about the future of comic books. “[But] people want the comic in their hand; they want to enjoy it.”