I had always thought that comic book store patrons generally fitted the Bart and Milhouse stereotype, being young boys aged 7-15 spending their pocket money and pay from their paper route, but this was dispelled the other day when I popped into a few comic stores in town looking for the Superman Red Son spinoff comic (which I have previously mentioned).
Instead, (to continue the Simpsons analagy) all the people in the stores were more the Karl and Lenny types: twenty or thirty something males fitting the reasonably well dressed administrative job type. They obviously had some personal spending power, and were not only buying the $3.75 paperback comics, they were also buying the $37 graphic novels, because comics were one of their hobbies, and they were happy spending (sometimes serious ammounts of) money on that hobby.
It all made the economics of the comic book industry seem far more sensible too.