Retail Therapy: Fuck ICE Edition: A conversation with Greg Ketter of DreamHaven Books

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Zach Rabiroff | January 30, 2026

In the now-famous protest photo of Greg Ketter by Theia Chatelle, Ketter is poised, tree-like, in mid-stride, his body clouded in mists of tear gas. Moments earlier, he had given the quote to the TV cameras that wrote itself into a part of cultural and political history: “I’m 70 years old, and I’m fucking angry.”

Ketter had come out on that Saturday not to protest, exactly, but to be a part of the Minneapolis community confronting ICE and CPB. He had been drawn out, initially, by the killing of Renée Nicole Good earlier in the month, and when ICU nurse Alex Pretti became the second Minneapolis resident killed by federal authorities in the space of three weeks, Ketter felt compelled to stand with others at the site of the murder. "I got there about an hour after the murder and went right up to the intersection that ICE had taped off and stood guard. There were perhaps 50-100 of them and several hundred observers/protesters milling around. Some were right up front yelling and swearing. I became one of them," Ketter wrote on his Facebook page.

Ketter is a comic shop owner, and a notable one: his shop DreamHaven Books, founded in 1977, is the oldest continuously operating comic shop in Minneapolis, and among the oldest in the United States. And while the extent of national attention has been somewhat new to Ketter – he spent the three days following his appearance on the news fielding interviews with national and local press – it is not the first time he has stepped into the media spotlight. In 1987, he became one of the founders of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and remained on the board of that organization for the next two decades. In 2020, his shop was damaged during the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, prompting Ketter to reluctantly open a GoFundMe to support the store’s recovery.

But while Ketter sounds weary after the past three days, none of this seems to have dimmed his commitment to either comics or to political principle. The Comics Journal spoke with him on January 27 about where he, and his community, find themselves now.

ZACH RABIROFF: It's obviously been a busy couple of days for you.

GREG KETTER: That's an understatement. We're getting orders every minute; there's more orders coming in and phone calls and people just offering support. People have been wonderful, mostly. Only a few crank calls.

For people who aren't in Minneapolis, can you try to describe what it's been like, and what it’s like now?

Well, I guess in Minneapolis, we really do care about community. We care about each other, and people have been tremendous about the whole thing. And we like immigrants, overall. I mean, unfortunately there's been news about the fraud and everything else, which was a very tiny percentage of people and a smaller percentage of immigrants, but they happen to be involved and that's a shame. But overall, people are just very pleased that we have the immigrant populations that we have.

How did you kind of get involved in...it feels wrong to call it a protest. But how would you describe what you were doing out there?

I was there for several reasons. For some reason, I wanted to be present. When they killed Renée Good, I went to the memorial that evening, and that was just thousands of people getting together to show respect. And there was a lot of “Fuck ICE,” and everything else going on, but really I think it was just to show support. And Saturday, I went down there because I felt I should be there and I hadn't actually witnessed ICE at all. Amazingly, I hadn't seen any of the things going on. I'd been to other gatherings. I'd been to strategy meetings and things like that, but I hadn't seen ICEitself in the flesh. So I went to watch, to see what was going on.

Had you been involved with any political activism in the past?

A bit. I mean, I was a co-founder of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which we started in response to prosecution of [the Illinois comic shop] Friendly Frank’s back then. And Denis Kitchen called me, and right away, and we started fundraising, and then we started the permanent CBLDF. I was on the board for the first 20 years, and then I moved on. I've always been a free speech advocate. That's been my main thing.

But has it been uncomfortable for you or strange for you to be getting as much attention as you have been over the last few days?

Oh my God. I'm on the verge of hysteria every morning. If you saw the video, you could see it in me there. That was just the beginning, where I'm angry, and I'm sad, and I'm frustrated, and I'll laugh and I'll cry all in the same breath. And people have been so supportive. I mean, I've had thousands and thousands of emails, and texts, and phone calls, and it's been overwhelmingly supportive. They say I speak for them, and I'm really very humbled by that. I mean, I was speaking for me, but I guess I hit the right words and the right tone.

Have your customers been supportive?

Oh, we've never seen such business. I had to call in some friends just to help out, and we don't have enough space here to do it all, but we're managing as fast as we can: processing book orders and people coming in the store to buy things, and people who've never been here – locals who've just heard about me, and decided to come see the store. Even as we're talking, I'm getting phone calls, but they'll have to call back in a little bit.

It sounds like a good problem to have, but has it been a problem handling sudden surge in business?

Oh, well, we're behind. Our websites have crashed. There's going to be more orders pouring in that we're going to have to try to keep up with. One of my best and boldest employees just retired Saturday, but then she came back Monday and she's working again. We weren't expecting this. And back when George Floyd was murdered, we're only a mile away or so from where he was murdered, too. We did do a GoFundMe. I hate asking for money, but we ran into trouble, and I never closed out the GoFundMe, and I forgot about it. And now people are donating to that again. And we don't need the money for that now, so I'm donating that money to local food shelves that I've supported over here. Because a lot of people can't even leave their houses, and people aren't delivering food to people who can't leave because they're afraid of ICE.

This is really an “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play” question. But other than the assault on Minneapolis from ICE, how has business been?

Overall, very good. I mean, we had a really tough Christmas just because the weather was so bad. Small Business Saturday is always one of our really big days, but we had some horrible weather that day and barely had a small business day.

What is horrible weather by Minneapolis standards?

Oh, lots of snow and 20 below zero.

Well, that'll do it.

I mean, the other day, I was out on Friday before Alex Pretti was killed, and there was a march here that had over 50,000 people, everybody was dressed for the cold. So, we're used to it in Minnesota, but it takes a lot to stop us altogether.

Your shop has been around in some form or another since 1977. So you've seen a lot of both the city and the comic book business. How would you contrast those early days with running the shop today?

Oh, boy. Yeah. When I started, I started with like $500 and a few comic books, and thought, "Oh, I have a comic book book store." I'm one of the few that's done comics and science fiction [prose books]. I've been recognized as an expert in both, even though I'm kind of a low-level expert. But I know what people like, and I know what I like. So I try to show people these things.

So what is it that you like these days? What are you stocking?

Well, it's all graphic novels. We gave up carrying individual floppy comics five years ago.

That was motivated by sales?

Mostly. And it was the sheer number of things. I mean, I'm a small operation and have been mostly just me and a couple of part-timers and trying to go through the Diamond Previews catalog with thousands of comics, and trying to stock them and put anything on your shelves is ridiculous. It's still bad, just trying to keep up with graphic novels, but at least...see, I'm more used to being a bookstore where you can restock things.

It’s a bookstore market versus a periodical or a collector’s market.

Right. I try not to cater just to the collector market. I do have collectors comics; I have back issues of certain things. I buy some of them, and we have a decent selection of some older comics, but I don't go out of my way for that. I've been doing underground comics. I've always been into underground comics, and we have the best selection around here, certainly in the Midwest. And I like unusual things.

So do you sell mostly comics these days, or mostly sci-fi prose books?

It's a pretty good mix. LGBTQ+ comics and graphic novels are huge. We're selling everything in that realm. I was just a guest of honor at Gaylaxicon that was put on here: it's a traveling convention for gay science fiction and comics fans. And I'm straight, I've been married for 40 years to a woman, but they made me a guest because I've always been very supportive of the community. But those books are our bestsellers. We're selling lots and lots of good graphic novels.

Because you sell graphic novels and books, you probably weren't affected by the bankruptcy of Diamond quite as much as other shops.

Not in the same sense. I mean, I never did open up accounts with Lunar or any of those. I would still order DC comics or a few Marvels, and I just gave them up. I just said, "After all this time, I can't order one or two comics from them." I didn't have the volume to order from them, so I didn't bother. And I get almost all my stuff from Ingram now. It used to be Baker and Taylor, but now I get it from Ingram, and I've actually just started buying a few things direct from various publishers. So I guess I have to go back to that. I mean, I've been at this long enough that I used to do that a lot.

So the industry's going full circle for you back to how it was in 1977.

Yep. I mean, I started out with Phil Seuling, of course. He was the only one then, Seagate Distributors. But I've dealt with pretty much everybody that's been a distributor since then. I made sure I had a diverse stock that no one else could even come close to in this city.

So how many people are working in the shop these days?

Usually it's just me and one or two people, and that's it. I have three part-timers right now.

So it's not as though you have your eye on expansion at this point?

No, no. I'm of an age that I'm thinking, how am I going to close this out someday?

You feel like that's coming anytime soon?

I want to stick around till [the store turns] 50. That'll be April 1st, 2027.

That’s not too long from now.

Exactly. I'll stick it out till then if my health holds out, and as long as nobody shoots me full of tear gas or something.

How would you describe your customer base these days? How has it changed over the years?

Well, as I said, I don't cater to the collectors as much. I’m mostly for readers. So I get a pretty decent crowd of anywhere from [age] 25 to even us older people in their 70s and 80s. I get a lot of people who buy undergrounds if they remember the old stuff, the old guys. I sell a lot more expensive books now: Taschen and those big $200 books. So I cater more to that market than back issue comics.

And you’re happier working in that market than the traditional Wednesday comic fans?

I think so, because these people are really appreciating and looking at the books. The whole slabbing phenomena has just irked me to no end. You can't even look at this stuff anymore. If they start doing that to books, I think I quit. It's bad enough they're doing it with pulps.

Do you still feel connected to comics and to books? Do you still feel like you have a passion for it?

Mostly, yeah. I mean, I'm not as involved with the comics feel as I once was. I used to publish adult comics with XXXenophile with Phil Foglio for about 10 years, and I just got out of that.

What do you think made you dial back your involvement with the business as a whole?

Some of it's the disillusionment, like I said: the commodification of some of the comics. I hate multiple covers, and all the variants, and all that kind of stuff. People didn't seem like they were necessarily reading them anymore. They were just accumulating them. I like to have people read.

We're kind of in a residential area. And the neighborhood just loves me, because I have children's books, children's graphic novels. I've been expanding that section all the time.

What are the big sellers in that area?

Amulet, the graphic novel series, Phoebe and the Unicorn. Amazingly, Calvin and Hobbes is still one of our bestsellers after all these years. 10 year old boys can't get enough of Calvin and Hobbe. We still sell a lot of Bone. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has picked up again quite a bit for us. I kind of missed the beginning of the trend, but they're doing well now.

You were one of the shops that first sold Eastman and Laird’s initial issue, weren’t you? You got in early on independent comic publishers.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. [And] I had Dave Sim in a couple of times, and he was always supportive. He wanted me to open up a Cerebus-only shop. He insisted that that would work really well: it'd be all Cerebus all the time. And I was like, "I don't think so.” I was there very early on with Elfquest. At the time, I was selling the collections that they were doing, and I had sold more than the entire B. Dalton's chain had sold at the time.

And now B. Dalton's gone and you're still around.

I'm still here and I'm still selling Elfquest.

So have things been tough since the ICE crackdown started? Has it hurt business? Has it made it difficult for people to come into the shop?

People have asked that. And I'm not sure if people are just not coming out right now, but there had been a decrease in physical business. Part of it has been the cold. Minneapolis has had some just incredibly cold weather recently, so people are staying home, but usually that bounces back really quick. And I wouldn't be surprised if the ICE presence has kept some people in. Nobody's safe.

Are you worried about retaliation from the federal authorities now that you've been in the news with all this?

People have suggested it to me. “Keep your eyes out.” And yeah, I'm sure it could happen. I won't be surprised, especially by this administration. I'm not paranoid about it, but I guess I'm waiting for it to happen, or possibly happen. So maybe foolishly waiting.

Do you have any advice you want to offer the rest of America for what we can do when our turn comes around?

Yeah, be like Minnesotans. Just be strong, be supportive, and hang in there. People will help support you.

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