Support Your Local Comic Shop: Secret Identity Comics (Chester, England)
- CBCCPodcast
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
We travel across the pond to Chester, England, and speak with shop owner Andy from Secret Identity Comics.
Support Your Local Comic Shop is a podcast series where we talk with rad comic book retailers about selling comics in 2026. It's published exclusively on our Patreon but is unlocked and free for all. This week, we're chatting with Andy from Secret Identity Comics in Chester, England.
Last year, we visited 51 comic book shops, but they were all trapped within the United States. To launch our 2026 season of the Support Your Local Comic Shop series, we felt we needed to break free from our American perspective and explore the environment and mood of slinging comics abroad. Friend of the pod and comic book creator Christian Ward knew exactly who we should have on the show: Andy of Secret Identity Comics.
Andy is relatively new to the comic book retailer arena. He opened Secret Identity Comics in Chester, England, shortly after lockdown, just as DC’s Absolute boom occurred in American shops. It’s one kind of madness to maintain a shop for thirty or forty years. It’s an entirely different kind of madness to claim your space in today’s shaky market.
As always, we begin our conversation by digging into our shop owner’s comic book origin story. We discuss the books that made Andy Wheately the reader and seller he is today. We discuss the similarities and differences between the American and English LCS. We talk about Absolute Batman and the American comic book writers dominating the conversation in his shop. And, yup, we discuss political anxieties and their impact on sales.
Andy has also embraced social media power. Make sure you're following the Secret Identity Comics Instagram.
Address:
39 Boughton
Chester, CH3 5AF
Listen to the Rest of Our Support Your Local Comic Shop Series:
Final Round of Plugs (PHEW):
The Comic Book Couples Counseling TeePublic Merch Page.
And, of course, follow Comic Book Couples Counseling on Facebook, on Instagram, and on Bluesky @CBCCPodcast, and you can follow hosts Brad Gullickson @MouthDork & Lisa Gullickson @sidewalksiren.
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Continue your conversation with CBCC by hopping over to our website, where we have reviews, essays, and numerous interviews with comic book creators.
Podcast logo by Jesse Lonergan and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.
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