Covering the Land of Lincoln

The Zone comics store opens third location at Shoppes of Grand Prairie

PEORIA — A comic book store with locations in Pekin and at Peoria’s Northwoods Mall has opened a third location at The Shoppes at Grand Prairie.

The Zone added a roughly 5,000-square-foot location that opened its doors on Sept. 1. It sells a range of comics, toys, games and other merchandise.

“I think I have more stuff at this location than probably both the other locations put together,” Scott Au, The Zone’s owner and operator, told the Journal Star.

Au opened the store’s first location in Creve Coeur in 1994, but left in 2015 after a series of mishaps with the store’s rented space.

“It just happened that the water pipe broke every other year for the last six years,” he said. “It was either time to retire or buy a building that I could just fix myself and not have those problems.”

He chose the latter, and opened the store’s Pekin location on Court Street. He opened the store’s second location at the Northwoods Mall in the summer of 2021.

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Comic trends have changed

In his nearly three decades in business, Au has watched the tastes of his customers change alongside trends in popular culture.

Magic the Gathering, a popular trading card game first released in 1993, has been a consistent mainstay alongside its competitors Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon. Since its debut in 2008 with the release of “Iron Man,” the movies and the TV shows of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have brought young people into The Zone.

Most recently, Au said, the Disney Plus series “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” has been drawing people into his stores in search of related comics and merchandise.

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Au pointed to the success of the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” which prominently features a Dungeons & Dragons game played by its characters, as a reason why the game has been particularly popular recently.

The YouTube star and influencer Logan Paul has been a major boon to sales of the Pokemon trading card game, Au said, after a series of videos in which Paul publicized the fact he had spent huge sums of money on rare cards.

The new Grand Prairie location has already hosted events for Yu-Gi-Oh!, Magic: The Gathering and various other games, and Au said he plans to host more.

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