QUOTE:
Book chains, like Barnes & Noble, tend to shove all their graphic novels into the same section as the Dungeon Master's guides and, as far as I can tell, usually only carry the best selling DC/Marvel/Dark Horse stuff.

...

Meanwhile, I'm told the book chains sell a lot of manga, especially to 14-year-old girls. Unfortunately, that audience doesn't seem to cross over.

This is one of the areas where I think there's a big divide between the UK and the US. In London at least (any comics fans outside of London, please let me know if it's different elsewhere) the book chains carry as much almost as much of the "high brow" stuff as they do the Marvel/DC collections. Every chain bookstore that has a comics section, and it's most of them in London, will have Sandman, Preacher, Transmet, Hellblazer, several Alan Moores, a few Clowes and Sacco books, and so on. They're not so good at carrying new books, it's true, but they certainly don't just concentrate on superheroes. And while they carry manga, it tends to be a smaller selection than in the US. I read somewhere that Naruto alone is responsible for something like half of all manga sales in the US, whereas it has no real cultural relevance here.