On an overcast Saturday afternoon at the spacious new Phantom of the Attic in Oakland, two young girls chatted happily as they approached the counter. Zoe Taeger, 13, of Morningside and Katie Davidson, 14, of Troy Hill found what they were looking for. Davidson was about to become the proud owner of the latest installment of Tite Kubo's "Bleach," an ongoing Japanese graphic novel about a teenager who sees ghosts.

"This place is very accommodating to girls," Taeger said "Plus, we like the UglyDolls," she said picking up one of the aptly named toys from a rack full of them. Both girls squealed with laughter at the spongy toys.

"This place is really huge and awesome," said Davidson, a ninth-grader who has been reading Japanese comics called manga since the sixth grade. "If you shop at Borders and buy weird stuff, you get weird looks."

At the counter, Davidson and Taeger are waited on by Anna-Lena Kempen, 21, a pretty woman with green-tinted blond hair. An art history and German anthropology major at the University of Pittsburgh, Kempen is nothing like the geeky young men who typically staff a comic bookshop. She has worked at Phantom for two years and maintains her own idiosyncratic style.

Twenty-five years into its run, Phantom of the Attic has evolved along with the community that surrounds it on South Craig Street. It is staffed by six clerks who know as much about the Steelers, avant-garde movies and obscure, hipster music as they do about the latest changes in the Spider-Man mythos. It isn't your older brother's comic book shop by a long shot.

"There are a lot of different scenes that come through here," Kempen said. "Some of it is more arty. Those folks like the small publishers," she said pointing to a section stocked with non-mainstream books. Kempen noted that manga culture appeals to girls such as Davidson and Taeger. "At the old store," Kempen said, referring to Phantom's former location across the street, "we appealed to a narrower demographic. Now we have this," she said.

"Our old comic shop was really good for 1995," said owner Jeff Yandora, 46, explaining the move from smaller digs to the much grander space in the former martial arts studio above Top Notch Art Centre at 411 S. Craig. "When this space became available last summer, we wanted to work with local talent for fixtures. We wanted to have a cool comic shop for Oakland," Yandora said.

To bring that about, Yandora hired local designer and architect Matthew Clifford to re-imagine the new site. "We told him what we wanted," Yandora said. "What he came back with blew us away."

Clifford took the 2,400-square-foot rectangular space and designed one that was the antithesis of the old Phantom, with its slightly claustrophobic charm.

Taking advantage of the natural light pouring in from the wall-length front windows and the skylights in the 15 foot ceiling, Clifford designed a space reminiscent of Superman's Fortress of Solitude meets Bruce Wayne's Bat Cave.

Clifford used the store's unusual angles to introduce modular display racks and postmodern furniture that can be rolled effortlessly to clean. Dust isn't allowed to gather long at the new Phantom. Japanese-style pagodas with models, toys and comic-book preservation material strategically dot the store.

"Some customers are weirded out by all the space," Yandora said. "Ninety-nine-point-eight are fine with everything, though."

Clerks can manipulate racks to accommodate books in a variety of sizes, making the display of new comics on Wednesdays a game of visual chess instead of the former monotony of stacking books.

Customers who used to be shoulder-to-shoulder at the old store now have room to move around without invading each other's space.

Back issues are filed alphabetically in shelves that slide easily out of cabinets. Though still an important part of the store's stock, old comics are not as visible as the new comics and graphic novels. In the only concession to the traditional comic store design, the walls are lined with racks that allow for versatility of display.

"You can think of each rack as a comic book page with each shelf as a panel so you can read a chunk of information at a time," said Wayne Wise, 47, the store's assistant manager and its only published comic book author and horror novelist.

"I think of Jeff as a time traveler who went to the future to see what comic shops looked like. Then he came back here and built it," said Dan Certo, 23, a clerk.

"The old paradigm of spinner racks and boxes in the center of the comic store is dead," Wise said. "We want to be more accessible to people used to Barnes & Noble who would find our old store off-putting."

Wise said that because the business is changing more toward the direction of graphic novels and away from comics, Phantom reflects this in its philosophy of display.

The current hot book everywhere is the trade paperback of Alan Moore's "Watchmen" series, which first appeared in 1986.

"What is very exciting to the country is 22 years old for us," Wise said. "It's fascinating that it sometimes takes a movie adaptation to get people to return to this stuff."

The Oakland Phantom began as one store in a chain of five in 1983. In 1990, Yandora bought the store from its former owner, Jim Weston. Today, three of the original five stores remain.

Locally, Eide's Entertainment Downtown is the area's biggest dealer of comics. New Dimension Comics is the region's biggest chain. Phantom of the Attic in Oakland is content to carve out a niche in the shadow of the universities by attracting discriminating readers. Yandora also owns the game shop that occupies the comic book store's former space across the street.

"We're a small local business," Dave Burgbacher, 39, the store's general manager said. "We appreciate the support we get from all of our customers."