Sadly, this kind of situation happens in almost every stereotypical "man space." I've never stepped foot in a comic book store, but I duck into music stores every chance I get to check out new guitars, look at soundboards, play drums, all of it.
When I'd go to those stores with my guy friends, employees would come up to us and show us things, speaking in tones that one uses in adult conversation. However, the one and only time I went to a music store with one of my girlfriends (no guy with us) we moved around like ghosts for 45 minutes. Literally not a single employee came to see how we were doing.
Going into a music store solo as a woman is hit-or-miss, but predominantly miss. It doesn't even matter how I look when I go (I have tons of "scene" clothes, for lack of a better term) the result is always the same: I might get a nod from an employee or two as they're passing by to help out some dude who looks like Jimmy Buffett, Dave Grohl, or Dimebag Darrell. When the employees DO speak, their voices betray an assumption that I don't know my ass from a splash cymbal.
We women CAN achieve some cred in those places, but we have to prove ourselves above and beyond what would be expected of any guy just to earn a modicum of the same respect.
I eventually won over an entire music store and got all the employees to wait on me hand-and-foot. Know what it took to do that? One day, an employee saw me playing a guitar as he passed through the acoustic room checking on the customers. About half an hour later, he came back through and I was the only one still in there. As he was about to leave, he stopped, swung back around, and asked, "Were you playing left-handed earlier?" I told him no, put down the lefty guitar I was playing, picked up a right-handed guitar right next to me, and started playing the same song right where I'd left off on the other guitar. Fifteen minutes later, it was obvious that the entire store heard about me because everyone's tone was VERY different.
So, yeah! Often times, we women have to do what over 95% of guys can't do in order to be seen as more than pair of tits on legs who dropped in to lower men's collective IQs. In my case, the boys noticed that I could play equally well on left- and right-handed guitars, and that's what it took. It's not like I played more skillfully than I did before they noticed, but I had to blow their minds (hey, watch it!) to get any attention in their manly domain.