This post sponsored by TEMU
Stephen Trovei built Cyberspace Comics into one of America’s largest online comics sellers. Temu is helping him reach readers who didn’t know they were fans.
When Stephen Trovei listed comic books on Temu in July, he became the e-commerce platform’s first comics seller. Within a month, his company Cyberspace Comics had sold 3,800 books with a 98% five-star rating, tapping into an audience far beyond the collectors who usually drive online sales.
For Trovei, the breakthrough was less about sales volume than the kind of readers he reached. Temu’s discovery-based shopping model has exposed comics to casual buyers in a way that recalls the supermarket and newsstand sales of decades past. “On other marketplaces, people come for comics,” Trovei said. “On Temu, people discover them by surprise, and that discovery is powerful.”
Now he sees customer names he doesn’t recognize placing repeat orders. “They come back regularly on Temu,” he said. “I don’t find them on any other platforms.”
The shift could help revive a category that has lost visibility in everyday retail. Comic books once sat alongside magazines and paperbacks in grocery stores, department shops, and corner kiosks, but over the past two decades much of that shelf space has vanished as digital content crowded out print media.
“How do people find out about comics unless they wander into a local comic store?” Trovei said. “A lot of cities don’t even have those.”
From basement to warehouse
Founded in 2000 as a side hustle, Cyberspace Comics has grown into one of the largest online comics retailers in the U.S., operating out of an 8,000-square-foot warehouse in Huguenot, New York. Trovei and his nine-person staff now ship orders within a day, and the company has listed more than 102,000 comics on Temu. The surge in demand has prompted plans to hire additional staff.
Trovei’s obsession started when he was seven or eight, digging through his father’s stack of old issues. “I couldn’t get enough of them,” he said. “I just read them over and over and over again.” His father took him to conventions to hunt for more. For Christmas, he asked for comics and received collectibles from the ‘60s he still has today.
Stephen Trovei (left) with his friend Joe Intranuovo (right) in 2003 after purchasing 30,000 comics (Courtesy of Stephen Trovei)
Just before his senior year of college, his friend Joe Intranuovo found a lot of 30,000 comics for sale on eBay. “I said, ‘Dude, we should buy that,’” Trovei recalled. They hauled the lot back to his dad’s house and littered the basement with books, sorting through them that summer. Then each took boxes back to campus and sold them out of their dorms.
That venture would become Cyberspace Comics in 2010 and steadily expanded into a full-time operation. But even as the company built a loyal following on online platforms, Trovei said breaking through to new readers remained difficult. With more than 10 million comics listings on one leading e-commerce marketplace alone, visibility was limited.
“We’re just a drop in the bucket,” he said. “The hardest part is getting noticed.”
A new channel for discovery
Temu has given Trovei a new way to reach first-time users. Beyond individual issues, Trovei is considering bundles and themed collections to draw in first-time buyers.
Temu’s free shipping thresholds and bulk ordering incentives also help. Instead of one or two issues, Trovei said many customers purchase in larger batches — sometimes dozens of books at a time. “We’ve had orders of 10, 12, even 67 books at once,” he said. “That means readers are getting more stories, not just a single issue.”
Stephen Trovei – the Owner at Cyberspace Comics (Courtesy of Indie Studios NYC)
He also sees potential for other small pop culture sellers, from vinyl records to collectible cards, to benefit from the same discovery-driven model.
His advice for anyone looking to sell collectibles online: fall in love with what you’re selling. “That passion is going to fuel the grind,” Trovei said. “Without loving it, it’s hard to want to do all that work. Because this is a lot of work.”
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